WalMart.com enters the digital music market

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s WalMart.com today launched a digital music service that offers music downloads at 88 cents per song, 11% less than the 99 cents charged by most other services. If the test goes well with customers, Wal-Mart will officially roll out the service early next year, it said.

"We`ve found that easy access to a wide range of music is very important to the Wal-Mart customer," says Kevin Swint, WalMart.com`s senior category manager of entertainment media. "With 64% of our customers online, we see digital music downloads as a natural extension of the music selection offered in Wal-Mart stores.”

The Music Download service lets WalMart.com customers download music in the Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format to their Windows PCs, burn songs to a CD or transfer songs to a portable music player. The service, which Wal-Mart says offers hundreds of thousands of songs, was developed in partnership with Anderson Merchandisers. Anderson, which provides digital music through its Liquid Digital Media unit, already supplies music products to Wal-Mart stores and Walmart.com.