Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
This undercuts Apple's $US0.99 for protected tracks, let alone the $US1.29 charged for unprotected 'iTunes Plus' tracks.
Furthermore, Wal-Mart can offer DRM-free tracks from EMI and Universal (the two main labels offering unprotected music) whereas the latter has shunned Apple, reportedly as payback for resisting Universal's push for variable pricing.
Apple's use of AAC encoding rather than MP3 means smaller files for a given quality or better quality for a fixed file size, but for most buyers that's less important than price and availability - especially as MP3 is the 'plays anywhere' format. Though talking of availability, Wal-Mart does not offer recordings carrying the RIAA Parental Advisory Label.
According to some reports, Apple makes as little as 10 cents per track, yet Wal-Mart is undercutting it by 35 cents per track. Either Apple is making a lot more out of music sales than anyone thought, or Wal-Mart has got a better deal from the labels. The company has a reputation for wringing low prices from its suppliers, and is already the largest music retailer in the US, ahead of Best Buy and Apple.
Although some observers suggest Universal executives are keen to curb Apple's growing dominance of the music download market, a sweetheart deal with the overall market leader would seem a strange way of going about it.
Ironically, Mac users are one group that won't be affected - Wal-Mart's music download site insists on Internet Explorer. Attempting to enter the store through Safari or Firefox on Mac OS X leads to the message "We're sorry, your operating system is incompatible. To provide the best download experience, we can no longer support Windows 98, ME or NT. Please visit again after you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP." Presumably Linux users see a similar message.
We'll be charitable and suggest that this isn't a sign of incompetence on the part of the world's biggest retailer but merely an indication that they've been really busy and haven't got around to changing the site to reflect the fact that it no longer sells only OS-dependent Windows Media files.
Wal-Mart continues to sell protected WMA tracks at $US0.88.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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