Wal-Mart to sell DRM-free tracks

The name "Wal-Mart" and the words "cutting edge" are rarely used in the same sentence--unless, of course, you're talking about cutting the edge off of some prices. Despite this fact, the undisputed king of discounted NASCAR memorabilia has recently been spotted moving more and more toward high-tech, with Dell PCs, bloatware-free machines and even some of the first large-scale RFID deployments. Now, the big box retailer is setting sail into the relatively uncharted waters of DRM-free music downloads: Wal-Mart's online music store has joined iTunes and eMusic in offering DRM-free tracks. The company's MP3 catalog now features "thousands of [DRM-free] albums and songs" from EMI and Universal Music, priced at  $0.94 per track or $9.22 per album. As with Apple's offerings, the tracks are encoded at a higher quality rate of 256kbps--though it remains to be seen whether or not Wal-Mart will raise prices on the tracks, in order to charge a premium for unrestricted files, as Apple does. While this is certainly a progressive move on the part of Wal-Mart and the labels involved, it would be nice to see just a little more progress in Wal-Mart's online music store--how about starting with support for operating systems other than just XP and Vista?

For more on Wal-Mart's DRM-free tunes:
- see this Engadget article