Walmart gets into the game

Michael Gartenberg | August 22, 2007, 09:17 AM

No surprise, when Universal made the announcement about their DRM (and Apple free) experiment, they mentioned Walmart as one of the stores going to sell the catalog. Overall, not too much to get excited about. $.94 vs. $.99 won't matter much to consumers. Our data says that while there's a cliff as you get above $.99 there's little benefit to going below (unless you get really, really low).

Lack of DRM is interesting but it's not clear that it matters to the vast majority of consumers, at least matter enough for them to stop buying from Apple, buy from someone else and put the music into iTunes on their own. While the handwriting is on the wall for DRM protected music for lots of reasons, it's just not that big an issue for most consumers who also buy video content, games and audiobooks from Apple in addition to music. The fact that Walmart's catalog is limited isn't helping either, although at least their stuff will play on an iPod.