Walmart’s Updated MP3 Downloads

Giant discount retailer Walmart has slashed its price for MP3 music to 74 cents, challenging both leader Apple and Amazon. The Bentonville, Ark. chain also announced Tuesday it’s MP3 store will offer a free download with each music CD purchased.

The new pricing is limited to what Walmart calls its “Top 25,” songs from such artists as Coldplay, Nickelback and Carrie Underwood.

The Walmart announcement comes as Apple offers 99-cent MP3 pricing and Amazon sells DRM-free music for 89 cents. With 8 million and 4.5 million tracks, respectively, both Apple and Amazon have larger MP3 libraries than Walmart’s 3 million selections.

In 2007, Walmart touched off a price war after it announced it would sell MP3 tracks without Digital Rights Management technology for 94 cents each. Apple responded by reducing its non-DRM tunes to 99 cents from $1.29.

“Price is important, but the experience is vastly different on iTunes than it is on Walmart’s site, same with Amazon,” Mike McGuire, Gartner’s music analyst, told Cult of Mac.

In addition to the price cut, the giant retailer also said starting in November it would begin offering a free MP3 download with every CD purchased.

The relaunched MP3 Music Downloads store will now support the Mac, as well as Linux and Windows. Walmart also added the Windows version of the iTunes application alongside Windows Media Player.

According to the most recent seed notes at HMBT.org, Apple may be trying to wrap up development of Mac OS X 10.5.6.

The latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 seed (9G38) provided to developers today lists no remaining issues. It’s always difficult to predict when Apple plans on delivering the final version to end users, but having no known issues is usually considered a sign of pending release. The previous seed was published just earlier this week.

Again, Apple appears to be focusing on MobileMe sync testing for portable computers. In addition 98 other bug fixes are detailed within the published seed notes. Apple released the last update to Mac OS X 10.5 in September.

Article Link: Mac OS X 10.5.6 Development Wrapping Up?

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