Wal-Mart is our DRM friend?

[thewayne]

Wal-Mart orders ALL of its online store music vendors to provide plain MP3s!

The 800 pound gorilla has spoken!

There is an interesting, if somewhat frightening, quote in the article: "Though Wal-Mart maintains a modest 2% market share in the digital download arena, its market share for physical CDs is considerably larger: about 22%, Billboard estimates."

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/wal-mart-kills.html

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i6efb69eb2243cb842be35f0eab40082d

EDIT: the Slashdot thread hit after I posted this: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/03/235241

Comments

[silveradept]

Fantastic, Wal-Mart. But they said they'll use WMA format if there aren't MP3s, which I think is the bigger death knell for the record industries. I don't know how well iPod and popular MP3 players handle WMA.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

iTunes will convert WMA to MP3, all you need to do is drag and drop. I don't recall if I've done that on my Mac or in a Parallels XP Pro session, I'll try it on my Mac tonight if I remember.

[silveradept]

Hrm. All right then. I wonder what sort of quality one gets out of a WMA, though.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Acceptable. I just converted a friend's library from WMA to MP3 as his laptop was considerably more wimpy than my MacBook Pro. They sound pretty good, I would have to look at file dates to tell you which ones started as MP3s and which ones were converted from WMAs.

Now, I'm just saying that from the standpoint of listening through an iPod in a car stereo or through my laptop's speakers, which, though admittedly good, are not comparable to my pair of Bose 301 series IV.

[silveradept]

There's probably varying bits of quality to them, but much of my experience with WMA is that it's fairly proprietary and was used for those people who really needed to compress hard on something for small file size, and quality suffered as a result.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

My friend ripped to it by mistake: he didn't know he could tell Windows Media Player to rip to MP3 by default, but by that time he'd ripped a significant portion of his library.