Wal-Mart has put out a press release to say it is now selling MP3 music files free of copy protection, known as DRM (Digital Rights Management). This follows the Universal Music Group announcement (below) of an experiment with DRM-free tracks, which listed "Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Best Buy Co, RealNetworks Inc's Rhapsody, Transworld, PassAlong Networks and Puretracks Inc" as participants. Wal-Mart says:
At only 94 cents per track and $9.22 per album, the new MP3 digital format delivers value, convenience and the ability for customers to play music on nearly any device, including iPod, iPhone and Zune portable media players. Wal-Mart is one of the first major retailers to offer MP3 digital tracks with music content from major record labels such as Universal and EMI Music.
Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's senior director and divisional manager for digital media, says the MP3 catalogue "includes music from popular artists like The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, KT Tunstall, Amy Winehouse, Maroon 5, George Strait and Nelly."
Wal-Mart has put up a free MP3 track -- 12 Stones' It Was You (Acoustic) -- to attact business.
At 94c each, the 256kbps MP3 tracks are more expensive than Wal-Mart's copy-protectected 128kbps WMA downloads, which cost 88c each. However, they are cheaper than tracks from Apple's iTunes Store, and will play on a much wider range of devices. For equivalent sound quality, the MP3 files are also much larger.
Although the MP3 tracks will play on Apple iPods, Mac owners may have problems buying them -- unless they also run Windows. The Wal-Mart store says it requires "Windows 2000, XP or Vista (sorry, no Mac or Linux)" and purchasing needs Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player 9 or later. Of course, a friend could buy the DRM-free MP3 tracks on their behalf and pass them on.....
Update: Sorry, not being a Wal-Mart shopper, I missed the fact that Wal-Mart does not sell music that includes "inappropriate content". As Ars Technica points out: "Only edited versions of albums with parental advisories are available, just as they are in Wal-Mart's offline stores." (In other words, Wal-Mart does not sell CDs that have warning stickers. If record labels choose to provide versions that don't need stickers, Wal-Mart will sell them.)
