After seven years in the digital music business, Wal-Mart is closing up its digital music shop at the end of the month.
The company announced Tuesday that it will close its .mp3 music store.
“We recently notified our music partners that we’ve made a business decision to no longer offer MP3 digital tracks as of Aug. 29, 2011,” the company said. “All content in the store will be disabled and no longer available for download from the store.”
Wal-Mart began selling music digitally in late 2003, just months after Apple launched iTunes. The discount store sold tunes for 88 cents, compared to iTunes’ 99-cent price.
The store has since raised its prices for most new songs to $1.24, 5 cents less than iTunes.
But the store failed to create any real competition to Apple’s industry-dominant service.
In its announcement, Wal-Mart said it will continue to sell “physical record music products” online and in retail stores. It also will continue to support customers who bought restricted files in the WMA format.
Perhaps best summed up by my initial reaction: “WalMart had a digital music store?”
I will miss the free song of the week. I got “Memories” by Weezer from there for free.
Yeah .. now which songs that I bought will I not be able to play because Windows Media Player cannot find info for them?
Richard raises an interesting point. How were the songs DRM’ed? Will their legitimate purchasers still be able to play the music?
As Borders sinks into the quicksand, they’ve at leased offered to migrate your e-book purchases to another service.
Is this another example of “too big to fail” failing? Seems to be the theme song of the current economy.
PS. Thought I typed “at least” in my prior message, not “leased.” I’ve been working for real estate people too long.
I can’t understand how Walmart wasn’t making any profit from this. They must have been selling some amount of music and there’s no inventory to move around, so why not keep it around. iTunes needs some competition.