Here’s a crazy twist to the DRM-free digital downloads story - Wal-Mart is selling digital music files on its website right now without the restrictive technology known as DRM. The world’s largest retailer now offers a new mp3 catalog with “thousands of albums and songs from major record labels such as Vivendi’s Universal Music Group and EMI,” for a mere 94 cents per track and $9.22 per album. That’s quite a discount compared to Apple iTunes’ price of $1.29 per track of DRM-free files! It’s even cheaper than a restricted file from iTunes!
And, if you use Windows Media Player or a Zune, and you don’t care about playing files anywhere else, you can purchase wma-only files from Wal-Mart for an outrageous 88 cents per track! It can’t get any cheaper than this. In fact, in typical Wal-Mart style, they have even undercut the musicians’ prices. Most bands who sell there songs online, with the SNOCAP software or similar, charge 99 cents, and still have to give 10-30 cents to the company they use to make the sale. Even selling your files directly with a paypal store will still mean giving a cut to paypal for their services. Not many musicians would be willing to part with a song for 88 cents - after a 10 cent cut they would only pocket 78 cents which is a pretty low-ball price even at wholesale.
So what do you - as musicians and music consumers - think of this new deal? As a consumer I love the sound of it, but as someone interested in the sustainability of the bands themselves, I’m not sure. Of course, as long as the band has a major record label deal with EMI in the first place, it probably won’t make a difference to their wallets. But, how will this reflect on the music industry and unsigned bands as a whole? Who will buy a song from an unsigned band for 20 cents more than a song from a famous band?
Link
Get more details from the Reuters article that first reported this news…
I haven’t checked out Wal-Mart’s website yet. I’m not sure I want to go there… Leave some feedback here, let me know how you feel about this.
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