It was actually very easy to predict. One simply had to look at all the other companies who decided to turn off their DRM servers leaving their customers standing in the rain. All of them caved in after announcing that they would turn off their DRM servers.

Why don’t the decision makers look around first to get a feeling for what will happen if they announce the shutdown of DRM servers? It happened numerous times already in the last years and it always went off the same way. Company A announces the shutdown of their DRM servers. They usually do that by mailing their customers or posting an announcement in the online store.

The online community notices what company A is trying to do and is writing about it in protest. No one likes the decision of company A at that time. Bad press and customer complaints result in company A changing their mind and either providing their customers with a better deal or canceling the decision to turn off the servers.

Why can’t there be an instructions manual for overpaid managers who think that laying all the burden of turning off a service on the customer is a good idea that would save the company money?

Here is the original email send out by Walmart (via Engadget):

NOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.

Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time. What this means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no action required on your part. Our customer service team will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com.

While our customer support team is available to assist you with any issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.

We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best service possible to you. As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store, we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service and your account via email.

Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.

The Walmart Digital Music Team

Who wants to bet on the next company that is making the same mistake?

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With the right strategy and advertisement they could build a service that would be able to compete with iTunes. Before I go on I would like to add that I personally think that all services are inferior to P2P even with the risks involved but it will be a long time before the Music Industry will acknowledge this.

Back to Amazon. To compete they have to do better than iTunes otherwise not many users would want to make the switch to Amazon considering Apple’s coolness factor with the kids and nerds.

Amazon tries to achieve this by offering DRM free albums that have a maximum price of $9.99 while most are sold for $4.99 to $8.99 compared to Apple’s price of $9.99. Some albums are even priced lower than this. The cheapest that I was able to find was priced at $0.99.

The license agreement grants the user the right to copy, burn, store and transfer the music downloaded for private use not mentioning any maximum number of computers or devices that you can transfer the music to. Every song can be listened to for thirty seconds before deciding whether to purchase it.

I did make a test purchase of course and have to say that the speed is excellent. I paid $0.89 for Smells Like Teen Spirit from Nirvana. The song is using 256 Kbps and has all the mp3 tags needed as well as cover art included. Amazon does store a song Id in the mp3 tags.

Visiting the site again it told me that I had purchased that song already at todays date.

Amazon does offer a download manager that users could use to download the songs but this is not a must. I decided to download the song without the download manager. I suppose it could be a good idea if you do download a lot of albums from Amazon.

The download manager can automatically add the songs to iTunes or Windows Media Player when the download finishes.

The only real problem that I see at the moment is that the amount of songs that are offered is inferior to Apple’s catalogue. Several major labels are not represented yet at Amazon’s Mp3 store. This should be a top priority for Amazon.

Users should compare prices between iTunes and Amazon Mp3 if the album or song is available at both stores and most likely the Amazon store will be cheaper if the song is available there.

Read More:

Amazon MP3 Beta

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