Giant discount retailer Walmart has slashed its price for MP3 music to 74 cents, challenging both leader Apple and Amazon. The Bentonville, Ark. chain also announced Tuesday it’s MP3 store will offer a free download with each music CD purchased.
The new pricing is limited to what Walmart calls its “Top 25,” songs from such artists as Coldplay, Nickelback and Carrie Underwood.
The Walmart announcement comes as Apple offers 99-cent MP3 pricing and Amazon sells DRM-free music for 89 cents. With 8 million and 4.5 million tracks, respectively, both Apple and Amazon have larger MP3 libraries than Walmart’s 3 million selections.
In 2007, Walmart touched off a price war after it announced it would sell MP3 tracks without Digital Rights Management technology for 94 cents each. Apple responded by reducing its non-DRM tunes to 99 cents from $1.29.
“Price is important, but the experience is vastly different on iTunes than it is on Walmart’s site, same with Amazon,” Mike McGuire, Gartner’s music analyst, told Cult of Mac.
In addition to the price cut, the giant retailer also said starting in November it would begin offering a free MP3 download with every CD purchased.
The relaunched MP3 Music Downloads store will now support the Mac, as well as Linux and Windows. Walmart also added the Windows version of the iTunes application alongside Windows Media Player.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
2 responses to “Walmart Relaunches MP3 Store With 74-cent Tracks”
Dropping prices alone isn’t the answer, altho it IS consistent with Walmart’s propensity for bargains. The “offering a free MP3 download with every CD purchased” sounds like a simple, but novel way to build awareness of their digital offerings.