Joining the rapidly evolving field of legal online music services, Wal-Mart recently began offering downloadable songs at their online music store. Following the Breakdown Industries reviews of Napster 2.0 and the iTunes Music Store, it is interesting to see how the world's largest company competes in an emerging niche market. True to form, the Wal-Mart approach appears to be an attempt to saturate the space with marginally lower prices at the expense of quality and independent selection. Read on to see how Wal-Mart's online music store rates against the competition.
Sound Quality: Each track on the Wal-Mart online store is recorded as a 128 kbps WMA file. WMA is Microsoft's proprietary media format, and the 128 kbps WMA encoding is reported to fall somewhere in between MP3 and AAC in terms of audio quality. As mentioned in the Napster 2.0 review, this bitrate will sound noticeably inferior to a CD, even on inexpensive headphones, and markedly artificial on a home stereo system. In spite of claims to the contrary by those that are selling low bitrate recordings, the difference is like going back to cassettes from CDs. Score: 4
Fair-Use Rights: According to the Wal-Mart Usage and License Rules, each song can be downloaded to one computer, and backed up to two other computers. Additionally, each song can be burned to a CD up to 10 times, and copied on to (but not off of) an unlimited number of portable devices. If something goes wrong during the original download, you can try again up to two more times. Similar to the Napster 2.0 DRM restrictions, these significantly effect how you use your music over the long term. Score: 4
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Shopping is done via the web-browser (Netscape, Mozilla, and IE are all supported) and purchasing music does not require a separate application. Playback requires Windows Media Player 9.0, which is available only for Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP. The WMA song files can be transfered only to portable devices that support the proprietary Microsoft format. This does not include the popular Apple iPod or any device that supports MP3 only. Score: 5
Usability: Shopping is done entirely through the walmart.com website. Songs can be found by searching by artists, album, or song name, but not by a combination of criteria (i.e., not by artist and album together). Results appear in a list of songs spanning multiple pages, and can be reordered by popularity, album name, or song name. Music is purchased by adding a song or album to a "Music Cart" and creating a required Wal-Mart account, and entering your credit card information. After this process is completed, each song can be manually downloaded and saved to the hard drive one at a time. Downloading the entire album at once is not supported. Broken downloads can be retried up to twice, and each song must be played for the first time within 120 days or it will expire. The Wal-Mart store lacks the elegance and convenience of the Napster and iTunes stores, mostly due to the limitations of web-based shopping. Score: 5
Price: True to Wal-Mart strategy, the store offers individual songs at a lower price than most competitors. Individual tracks can be downloaded for $0.88 each, and most full albums are available for $9.44. However, many albums are heavily censored, thus reducing the overall value to the consumer. Score: 5
Independent Selection: The Wal-Mart music store did not carry a single one of the representative popular independent albums. Clearly focusing only on major labels, Wal-Mart will not even sell the original version of many albums, stocking the "edited" version instead. Since most independent labels would never release an censored version, don't expect to see a wide independent selection in the future, either. Score: 0
Overall Score: Wal-Mart may be an appropriate choice for a particular demographic of individuals that want to save ten cents per song, run older versions of Windows, do not notice low sound quality, do not mind censored albums, and are not interested in independent music. People that do not fall into this demographic will likely want to look elsewhere for their downloadable music. Note: Breakdown unapologetically deducted one point from Wal-Mart's overall score due to their unethical and reprehensible business practices.Score: 3
Read the EMusic Review.
Read the Audio Lunchbox Review.
Read the Bleep Review.
Read the Napster 2.0 Review.
Read the Apple iTunes Music Store Review.
Read the Breakdown guidelines for this review.