The Wal-Mart music download site adheres closely to the principles of the corporation as a whole. It has been set up to give the consumer what they want at low prices.
The music library they have built on site is therefore packed full of artists and bands from all kinds of genres to suit all musical tastes.
And, all tracks (including new releases and chart songs) are priced at a flat $0.88 each so you’ll know from the outset that you’re getting good value for money here. You’ll also find that the majority of albums are priced more cheaply than the sum of their tracks so you’ll save even more on the cost of buying a ‘real’ CD, for example.
Wal-Mart’s digital audio service allows you to pick and choose what you buy and when you buy it. You don’t subscribe to a monthly service here – you can simply buy as little or as much music as you like. This makes the site a good option for both the occasional downloader and a particularly cost-effective one for the regular music buyer.
Despite the number of tracks on the site it’s never hard to find what you want. You can search by genre, artist, song or album and they have also set up special lists and playlists such as Top Downloads, Rising Stars and New Releases if you prefer to go that route. You can also stream part of most tracks to listen to before you buy.
Wal-Mart have also been able to negotiate exclusives with some labels, artists and bands so you may well find that you can download stuff on this site that just isn’t available anywhere else.
This site supports WMA in compliance with the DRM (Digital Rights Management) system. This does mean that you will experience some restrictions in what you can do with the music you buy. For example you can transfer a track as many times as you like to a portable MP3 player and you can download and back up your music to up to 3 computers but you can only burn a track to CD up to 10 times. However, this 10 times option is fairly generous by industry standards so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
This also means that you will need a WMA compatible portable player to use the service. If your player supports 'PlaysForSure' then you shouldn’t have any problems but if it doesn’t then you may well not be able to use the site. As the iPod doesn’t support WMA then you technically cannot use it here – some iPod users report that you can get round this by burning the downloads you buy to CD and then having iTunes convert the tracks for you. But, you also need to be aware that MAC users cannot access the site’s services at present so this may limit you further.
In order to keep up to speed with rights issues the site sometimes has to place restrictions of how you download certain albums or tracks. For example, some record labels insist that you can only download a full album and that you cannot break it down into individual track downloads and some tracks may also occasionally be made unavailable for download.
The general consensus with many users of this service is that it works best with Windows Media Player 9 or above so you may want to upgrade to a higher version if you don’t have this one already. They also report that the download software doesn’t like download accelerators and pop-up blockers so you may have to disable those packages while you are downloading to make sure everything works OK.
Check out more information on legal music downloads .