walmart online
several days ago, the new york post and usa today mentioned walmart getting into the online music business.
at that time, the wall street journal (couldn’t find a link) pegged it at about 200,000 tracks, mostly country. walmart being walmart, you can imagine they are likely to break the “99 cent” barrier that has become the universal per-track price point. and you can bet that they will use a little leverage to get those terms. and i think they aren’t going to be happy with the itunes economics (they apparently expect to make money on this, and they aren’t selling ipods).
with itunes (mac) launched in april (i think) and itunes (windows) launched in october 2003, it’s taken very, very little time for this field to get crowded enough to make it interesting to walmart.
now we might get to see just how much blood you can squeeze out of an artist.
update (2004.01.02): professor lessig has a very important review of the walmart terms.
update (2005.05.08): maybe these will help
update (2005.06.08): congratulations, applicants. you’re getting famous. for my commentary, you can check here and here. for other perspectives, see Comments around the net… on another subject, google is NOT doing very good at targeting this page. i also spotted myself an “r” for “leverage.” that was annoying… hey. maybe that’s the reason for all the confusion…