A few months ago I decided to dip my toe into the legal online music download pool. I love shopping online and I love getting new music. I had been hesitant to try any of the download services up `til then due to the heavy restrictions placed on the music. However, after lots of hunting, it looked like Walmart Music Downloads might be a satisfying choice.

The key features:

• Low price of 88 cents per song with even better deals when purchasing whole albums.
• WMA file format. I use a lot of Microsoft technology to pump music all around my house and also to take it on the go.
• Reasonable (is there such a thing?) DRM. Can burn songs to a cd, can sync to a device (my PDA in this case), can stream over a network.
• Tight integration with Windows Media Player. I can shop for music directly through Media Player, very cool.

There were a few drawbacks for me:

• I had to download a small applet before I could purchase any songs from the store.
• Sometimes the app would crash causing Media player to hang.

I went ahead and purchased Blue Man Group’s first album Audio as well as Who’s Next, The Who’s greatest hits album. (Baba O’Reilly is the best song ever written). The downloads were fast and the financial tranaction went as smoothly as any other online purchase. I enjoyed the albums and also went ahead and purchased the Producers soundtrack for my wife. For the most part, the downloaded music performed the same as the cd-ripped music I already had. There were, however, a few cases that soured the milk.

I typically load up a bunch of music onto my Pocket PC to listen to in the car. Often, I’ll throw those songs onto my work PC to listen to there as well. With the downloaded music I could easily sync the music onto the Pocket PC, but when I moved them onto my work PC they refused to play. I actually had to plug my work PC speakers into my PDA to hear the songs I had bought. This is definitely a case where the DRM causes a great deal of inconvenience to those who have paid for the music and it illustrates why I am against DRM in general.

Another issue that came up was also due to the DRM. Each music file downloaded through the Walmart Music Download service comes with a license file which controls what can be done with the song. This file has to be present in order for the song to play. My problem came about after I reinstalled Windows. The songs I had downloaded were intact and safe on a seperate drive but the license files were destroyed. So, all three albums became completely unplayable.

In all fairness, I had seen several warnings during the initial download process that mentioned backing up the license files. However, I would be willing to bet that the average user today would miss or skip that step as well. On a positive note, with a single email to the Walmart Music Download customer service the licenses were reenabled on Walmart’s servers. The next time I tried to play the songs Media Player simply reaquired the licenses and began working again.

I hope at this point you are thinking All that just to play some songs? That’s stupid!  It really is stupid.  As a paying customer I shouldn’t have to put up with all of that hassle. The DRM is there to keep me from copying a disc for my friend but, in all honesty, it is absolutely trivial to strip the DRM from the song files. By simply burning a CD of the songs I can create a full copy of the album with no copy protection. So now you say Okay genius, just burn a cd from all of the songs you buy. That doesn’t fit the bill. I want to download songs for the convenience, not to make extra work for myself.

While the Walmart Music Download experience was relatively a positive one, the technological problems related to the DRM on the songs soured it for me.

Have you ever downloaded music form a pay service? Do you refuse to? Comment on the forums, no registration required!

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