Walmart: all your music are belong to us

Davey Winder
Sunday, 28 September 2008 16:00

Business IT - Networking

Walmart is known for selling cheap stuff and keeping shoppers who want it cheap nice and cheerful. Now users of the Walmart music download service could lose access to some tracks they have already bought and paid for.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I will begin. Once upon a time, in the summer of 2007, cheap-stuff-seller Walmart opened a new store: an online music downloads store.

Just six months later, in February 2008, Walmart made good on the cheap and cheerful brand promise by switching to a totally DRM-free service.

Yep, one hundred percent Digital Rights Management free, do what you want with them, listen on any device MP3 music downloads.

Cool. Which is what everyone said at the time. Even those customers who had bought cheap DRM tracks in the first six months had nothing to complain about. Until now that is.

Until they got an email this weekend which informed them that "Walmart will be shutting down our digital rights management system that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site."

OK, no big deal, right? Well, how about the small problem that from October 9th those customers with protected WMA format files will no longer be able to transfer them to other computers, access them if they change OS or their system crashes.

Surely, still no big deal. Everyone backs up their DRM protected music downloads, don't they? The numbers of people who actually bought stuff in the short period from Walmart and have failed to back it up must be small, right?

But is that the point, and doesn't everyone deserve the right to decent customer service? More on page 2...

CONTINUES