In late 2003 Walmart took on Apple‘s iTunes store and launched their very own MP3 music store.
Now a little over 7 years later Walmart has announced plans to shutter the store.
According to the New York Times, Walmart will close down the download store on August 29.
“We recently notified our music partners that we’ve made a business decision to no longer offer MP3 digital tracks as of Aug. 29, 2011,” the company said in a statement.
Walmart launched the MP3 store in December 2003 with much fanfare offering downloads for only $.88, ten cents less than iTunes, the biggest mp3 store at time (and now).
Unfortunately for the giant retailer tracks purchased on their MP3 store were DRM protected, meaning users who purchased a track could not add it to their iPods.
Over the year’s Walmart made several changes to their MP3 store in hopes of attracting more users, however, none seemed to work very well.
In their statement Walmart said it would continue to offer support to customers who purchased DRM files through its store, in the WMA format.
