p2pnet - rss feed: Wal-Mart to join the gold-rush
Wal-Mart Stores, the second-largest music retailer, seems about to join the steadily swelling ranks of corporate giants determined to cash in on online music by adding a downloads to their repertoires, if only to get punters into their stores.
Sources - in this case, "four people who asked not to be named" - say Wal-Mart will start a download service based on Apple’s iTunes Music Store and has been, "in talks with record companies to license music for its own download service," Bloomberg.com reports here .
Wal-Mart’s version will be up by the end of the year and the company plans make the download service part of its Web site, says the report.
Wal-Mart, Best Buy Co and "other discount chains" use CDs, DVDs and videogames to draw customers into their stores, where they try to sell more profitable products, such as TVs, stereos and electronics, says Bloomberg, going on:
"They have taken a dominant share of music sales, in part, by using their size to get merchandise from many suppliers at lower prices and passing along part of the savings to consumers."
More than 12.7 million customers on average visited Wal-Mart’s Internet site each month in the third quarter, Bloomberg quotes ComScore, a research company, as saying, making Walmart.com the sixth-busiest US Web shopping site, behind companies including eBay and Amazon.
