Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is now offering customized music CDs for its online customers. The world’s largest retailer launched the new service Tuesday.

Like other companies, the Bentonville-based Wal-Mart already offers customers music they can download at their home computers for a fee. Customers with the proper technology can burn those songs to a CD.

Now, customers can go to the company’s Web site and select songs from a catalog of more than 400,000 choices, including rock, pop, country and new releases.
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The cost to download music from the site is 88 cents per song or typically $9.44 an album, Colella said. The cost for a customized CD of three songs is $4.62 plus 88 cents for each additional song. Shipping costs $1.97.

Analyst Phil Leigh of Tampa, Fla., founder of Inside Digital Media Inc., said other companies have been-there, done-that.

“I think they (Wal-Mart) are going to be disappointed. The price isn’t that attractive. It was tried before” by a few startup companies in the dot-com boom and was not successful, Leigh said. Also, other companies, like Apple iTunes, offer downloadable music that provides consumers “instant gratification.”

“There’s no real cost advantage to what Wal-Mart is offering here,” Leigh said.

… source