The market for ultra-low-ticket song downloads from online music stores continues to heat up. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Wal-Mart claims to have hundreds of thousands of songs available for download on its new site in Windows Media Audio format. The new site is meant to test customer reaction, the retailer says, preparatory to launching a full-fledged song-download service in the spring.
Currently, the Wal-Mart site accepts only credit and debit cards for song purchases. The sudden popularity of the market for online songs has helped revive interest in micropayments, and various startups are hoping to take advantage of consumer interest in low-ticket content from Web sites to launch their new services for managing payments. Peppercoin Inc. The retailer is also selling gift cards in its stores and online that can be redeemed for downloads.
As previously reported, the download store was developed in conjunction with Liquid Digital Media, the digital-music services arm of Anderson Merchandisers. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news. See latest videos, charts and news. Like the retail outlets, the online store will adhere to Wal-Mart's policy of not selling songs that carry parental advisory labels and instead offer the clean radio-play versions, Lin said.
Wal-Mart has become one of the record industry's biggest CD retailers. But in the online world, it is going up against the iTunes Music Store, which has about 70 percent of the market, Goodman said.
Wal-Mart isn't making Music Downloads available for users of computers that run on Linux or Apple's Macintosh operating system. By trying to attract users of computers running on Microsoft's Windows operating system, Wal-Mart will be competing against services like Napster 2.
Microsoft has said it plans to start an online music store during the second half of Wal-Mart's cents-per song price won't be enough of an advantage, because surveys show customers "don't see a big difference between 99 cents and 88 cents," analyst Goodman said.
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