Wal-Mart Closes Its MP3 Store

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
We used to always joke "who the hell would buy MP3s from Wal-Mart?" Well, I guess the answer is "nobody."

After more than seven years of selling digital music, Wal-Mart Stores will shut its MP3 store at the end of August, the company says. “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 in a statement.
 
What will become of the files with DRM relying on WalMart's servers?
 
Nowadays, people will go to YouTube for music. It's not good quality sound, but when your lazy and cheap, it's the place to go.
 
Nowadays, people will go to YouTube for music. It's not good quality sound, but when your lazy and cheap, it's the place to go.

Yep. When I want to hear something I don't own a copy of it's easy as hell to find.
 
Nowadays, people will go to YouTube for music. It's not good quality sound, but when your lazy and cheap, it's the place to go.

Spotify is even cheaper and the sound quality is as high as tracks off of Amazon and Itunes
 
I just use Amazon and Zunepass (shh, it's better than iTunes).

Zune Pass is sweet. Spotify is nice too with the ability to download and stream like Zune and $5 per month cheaper than Zune though you can't keep any tracks with Spotify.
 
Wow walmary sold mp3s!?!? Im sticking to zunepass for now, itunes can die in a fire.

On a hilarious note, itunes wanted to auto correct to urines.
 
Yep. When I want to hear something I don't own a copy of it's easy as hell to find.

If you purchase from itunes, amazon mp3, etc & listen to music offered by major american labels, that is true.

My wife likes (somewhat) major Brazilian bands which sometimes are not offered on any major service.

We end up buying cd's every trip to Brazil...
 
That's good news, I always thought that importing cheap MP3s from China to resell to the Americans was not patriotic. ^-^

They say they will continue to support people who bought protected wma files. No info on how long they'll continue to do it.
The DRM support is only for WMA files, not MP3s, so I guess they are dropping part of the DRM servers too. And yeah, they probably won't be supporting WMA DRM for long either, although it probably costs almost nothing to just keep the servers running.
They'd be better off offering their customers an app to strip the audio files from the DRM.
 
Nowadays, people will go to YouTube for music. It's not good quality sound, but when your lazy and cheap, it's the place to go.

Far easier places to get music, I like Beemp3, it's not officially illegal! (and lets not forget all the places that ARE less than legal with HUGE catalogs of music... after all, that's what "started" all the piracy ;) lol)
 
That's good news, I always thought that importing cheap MP3s from China to resell to the Americans was not patriotic. ^-^


The DRM support is only for WMA files, not MP3s, so I guess they are dropping part of the DRM servers too. And yeah, they probably won't be supporting WMA DRM for long either, although it probably costs almost nothing to just keep the servers running.
They'd be better off offering their customers an app to strip the audio files from the DRM.

I assumed the term mp3 in this context was being used as the generic term for a digital audio file. Did they actually sell files encoded in .mp3 format? I'm pretty sure mp3 doesn't support DRM.
 
I bought a few tunes from them. Not crushed to see them go, but a 75 cent d/l for a few songs was decent.
 
Back
Top