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Walmart Launches CD Music Service

“The service lets customers choose tracks from more than 400,000 songs–rock, easy listening, country, classical, and more–all from Wal-Mart’s Web site. There’s no downloading required, nor isaccess to a CD burner or a portable digital music device necessary.

Customers select songs that Walmart.com burns onto a physical CD and ships. “The customer orders music from the online catalog and chooses the title and cover art to personalize the product before the order flows through the system to the production facility where the CD is produced,” says Kevin Swint, Walmart.com’s director of media categories. “The process is automated.”

Walmart.com’s Northern California IT department created the online music service with an unnamed partner, Swint says. It ties into Walmart.com’s music “download platform on the back end, so human intervention isn’t required until the CD is packaged by hand.” The first three songs cost $4.62, and 88 cents per additional song. “

Read more at InformationWeek

Ian Bell
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
What is Spotify? Music, pricing, and features explained
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Spotify is the first name that comes to mind when you think of music-streaming apps. Love it or hate it, Spotify is currently the most popular music-streaming service, boasting 515 million users and more than 210 million subscribers, putting it ahead of competitors like Apple Music. But what exactly is Spotify, and how does it really work? We're answering all your questions with this deep dive into what you can expect from Spotify. 
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If you spend even a little time online, you've probably heard of Spotify. It's a popular free and paid music-streaming service founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Swedish friends Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Fun fact: the name happened by fluke when the partners were shouting names back and forth from different rooms in Ek's Stockholm flat, and Ek misheard one of Lorentzon's suggestions as "Spotify." They later backtracked the meaning as a combination of spot and identify, and there you have it. 
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Apple Music is one of the best music streaming services available, offering a catalog of more than 100 million songs, all in high-quality lossless audio at no additional cost, as well as a huge amount of albums and tracks in Dolby Atmos spatial audio, which if you haven't heard it, is music on a whole other immersive level. And while it does play a close second fiddle to Spotify's excellent UI and music discovery (as well as in global subscriptions), the Cupertino music streamer is still a giant and is loaded with cool features, live shows, and exclusives making it a tricky choice if you're deciding which to run with.

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