You know, considering how great Walmart is at selling shoddy products to lazy slobs, I’d have thought that their Mp3 store would have worked out a little better. All you gotta do is point, click, and punch in a few numbers, and as quickly as you can say “Kevin James is hilarious,” you’re mouthbreathing along to your favorite Days of the New tracks and reminiscing about your winning high school football season, right? I mean, I wonder what went wrong?
Well, according to digital music news, it’s all those yoga-doing hipster Democrats over at Apple’s fault, coupled with the fact that “point, click, and punch in a few numbers” isn’t really all it takes to use Walmart’s lumbering service. Even though their store has long offered 88-cent Mp3s (compared to Apple’s 99-cent—$1.29 range), the fact that iTunes has a slicker interface, the ability to store credit card info and tether purchases on multiple products, and relatively seamless integration with computers, iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc. means that lazy slobs everywhere could care less about spending a few extra cents in exchange for doing less work, even if Apple is a company full of soccer-playing soybean-eaters. So, short of Jeff Foxworthy coming out with his own line of Wamart-friendly smartphones, operating systems, and user-interfaces in the next week or two, anyone who was using the download store is sunk like a rogue jalapeno in delicious cheese sauce. Check out Walmart’s letter to its distribution and licensing partners:
After eight years in business, the Walmart Music Downloads Store located at mp3.walmart.com will close on August 28, 2011. All content in the Store will be disabled and no longer available for download from the store.
The sale of physical record music products on Walmart.com as well as in Walmart US retail stores will remain unaffected. Walmart Soundcheck (soundcheck.walmart.com) will remain operational as a live streaming site without any download options.
But don’t worry, Days of the New fans. Walmart has also noted that older, protected files will still be supported. “We’ve made a business decision to no longer offer Mp3 digital tracks as of August 29, 2011,” an executive said. “We’ll continue to provide support to our customers who previously purchased digital music through Walmart Music Downloads so they may continue to enjoy and manage their existing WMA files.” Wait, what the hell is a WMA file?
• Walmart: http://www.walmart.com
