Grab me one of those hoodies while you're there

Paul,

Grab me that MC Hammer !! I'll reimburse you ! ... lol !

Welcome to the digital Age ladies and gents. They have more tablet covers and ipod accessories than actual music. 

What IS "actual" music anyway?

i wonder how big the selection is for itunes/other online music retailers' gift cardholders

Sony Distribution claims that walmart is its biggest buyer of CDs. 

Seriously & record companies are complaining that CDs dont sell. People have no where to buy them! No local record store can compete with Walmart. 

Walmart doesnt give a shit about music sales because if they had the option to have HD TV space compared to CDs what do you think they would stock?

Walmart is a scam. Invest in gold

Wal-mart makes room for, and sells, what people want to buy. The size of the music dept. at Wal-mart, and the demise of record stores, is reflective of consumers level of desire to buy $5 and $10 pieces of round plastic with digital data imprinted on them.

It's interesting how retailers are abandoning CDs when, in fact, they still are a majority (though shrinking) part of the market. There's a lot of publicity on how digital has taken over, but it hasn't passed CDs (yet) as the dominent delivery method for music.

I guess Amazon must be getting a lot of the physical music business as its getting harder and harder to find it at a local retailer.

Nothing like killing the horse before it goes lame.

Walmart-thinks the horse is dead

RIAA-Suing those who ride the horse

Spotify- Not feeding the horse

VEVO- You can only see the horse when you sign up with horsebook

Universal- We need horses(EMI). Fuck it sell horses

Horse O'Riley- you cant explain that

 

You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him buy.

It's like being at Tesco.

And we wonder why physical sales are declining every year. It's a downward spiral, and a catch-22 at the same time. Music sells less so the retailers shrinks the floorspace dedicated to it. Which leads to less music sales, which leads to less floorspace....etc. We need retail (or a retailer) to catch the vision that music can be a great-selling product, one that people want to buy at a fair (not bargain basement) price. And then devote good floor space to it, merchandise it properly, and stock it well. Right now, it feels like a race to the bottom. David S.

Too many reasons why physical sales are declining (would require lots of paragraphs). The key take away is that retailers will naturally sell what consumers look for, need, and want. The "product" has evolved to many. But if the industry is to maintain space in these massive stores, it needs to create tangible products that justifies its existence in the Walmarts of this world. Who knows what that is and if it exists.

There are many people (older bracket) that WANT to buy CDs but can't, but then Wal-Mart is responding to sales #s and not a charity for finding all the lost buyers. If there's the good side to this it is that everything is under $10 which equals digital album download cost.

 

And this is in a big music town...

That is exactly why you can't purchase a CD.  What do you think would be the reaction if you announced to your friends at a UofTexas party that you just bought the latest Lana Del Rey CD at Walmart?

Lana Del Rey? 

That's your example... 

I think they fit PERFECT with one another... they are both whores :)

 

 

 

Screw Whoremart, Americans shouldn't be shopping there anyway, they're part of the problem not the solution.  If they would go away they would be replaced by all the little stores they fucked away with their cheap China and other slave labor crap.  Seriously, DON'T shop there if you care about your country and send a real message to the politicians and scabs who allowed this shit to happen.

Wal-Mart has about the same percentage of Chinese manufactured goods as any other store. I wish more stuff was still made in America, too, but it's not Wal-Mart's fault.

There's more 2 liter Cokes than CDs at this Wal-Mart.

Digital kills. But CDs still sell.

la fin d'une époque? le rayon musique a quasiment disparu

Remember when big box retailers were a major source of music distribution for artists?

Read this if only for the horse analogies in the comments section.

The CD is just an old medium...do you have any pictures of the section displaying 8-track tapes? Oh..its gone too....

I went there last week to buy a piano roll

They also only carry the edited versions, so your Rick Ross and Buckcherry gonna sound like sh**t.

I'm still into buying CDs, people tend to forget that these things are not forever graunteed. Ipods get lost or stolen, there goes thousands of your favorite music, and remember you threw all of your CDs away, so you'll have to buy a new ipod, find all of the music you  had on the ipod and start all over again.

Don't forget that you can also drop the gadget and it can break or malfunction. Nothing wrong with having an ipod, but I will also stick with my CDs.

It was once a big deal if they wouldn't carry a disc.

This is a sad story...

I couln't agree more. One day we will all discover that artist no longer make new music because of the same reason Walmart doesn't stock CD's. Artist will only make what people want to buy. Making music is EXPENSIVE... Soon you will notice the dust bunnies on your music collection and wonder, "Hey where's all the new music." MUSIC SUCKS!.

When we stop feeding the horse, soon it will refuse to run... Then we can all bang on rocks for our musical entertainment.... (I'm sure iTunes will be there to sell you a rock in every shape and size, but don't count on Walmart to stock any...)

No more horse analogies!!Music sucks because that is what the majority of people want

Now that's a scary thought!

Space at Target is about the same.  Also all discount

Good thing they're still pressing vinyl.

 

Should come as no surprise.  90%+ of the music sold at Wal-Mart sucks.  I don't really know anyone who shops for music at Wal-Mart who could be identified as a serious music fan.  Wal-Mart is where you buy toothpaste.

I was at a WalMart the other day & noticed the same thing as I walked by the music section. What bothers me about this is it is in stores like this (back in my day, it was Woolworth's) where young listeners will probably buy a physical musical product. Most of them won't have the faintest idea of how deep the sea of sound can be.
Another thing I noticed is all of the cd's looked like knock-offs; similar to all of those mafia illegal cds that were flooding the local stationary stores back in the 80's.

Still want to cling to the old model of the 'music industry'?

I still want to read liner notes with my music, I still want to look at artwork, see pictures, & read a lyrics booklet that I can hold in my hand. I still want high quality audio.....I can't get that with an mp3. 

What does any of that have to do with the "old model" of the music industry?

 

 

The music section of all stores is s-h-r-i-n-k-i-n-g...

Largest CD distributor in America?

So first off, I agree, its sad that physical records are not held as highly as they used to, as the works of art that they are. I full heartedly believe we should continue to fight the good fight, no matter how fruitless the end result. That being said I really need to comment on a fundamental flaw with this article and that most of our industry perpetuates.

We keep griping about how horrible this is, that sales are shrinking and the top is caving in and point at scenarios like these as the smoking gun, the residue of a crime that society and new social norms have committed. But wait - back up. These are pictures of the physical records section NOT the music section. The entire store is the music section. Its the hallmark cards playing The Beatles, t-shirts with Adelle lyrics, all those movies, video games, basically the entire toy section, yes, the physical isle (err…rack) and, of course, those speakers blasting adult-alternative 24/7. It comes as cheesy of a license as singing fish to meaningful works of art as the albums themselves. Walmart as a whole is an entire music reservoir with endless streams of revenue and even more waiting to be pioneered. We really need to let go of these traditional concepts of “sales” and move forward, and not move forward cautiously but rather lets tread heavily. Sales may always be part of the industry (maybe) but it seems like they may not always be our main source of income.

There's also an inherent issue with this indirect comparison of Walmart to the "traditional" record store, the Walmart-sized buildings that sold nothing but physical. Walmart is NOT a record store, never has been and never will be. Don’t judge them as if they were, as if they should have endless rooms of physical records. They are not in the business to sell records. Even the records they are selling are not contributing to any direct goal. Walmart loses money on that, it’s the wiggling worm at the end of their hook and they’re waiting to reel you in and that’s why Whitney is selling for $5. Now this raises an actual problem: Walmart selling our art below market value.  Is this really that bad? Is this really that offensive?

To those of you that think not, more power to you. Walmart is at least keeping this particular stream alive – but at what cost? It is a devaluation of artists, songwriters, sound recordings, songs and all of their rights holders. It’s the licensing equivalent of a singing fish (well, maybe that’s a bad example, who doesn’t love a singing fish!)… It’s the licensing equivalent of music in porn (woah! maybe not that bad)… Whatever it is, it is a portion of any form of value-degenerative transactions involving our music. All of which deserves its own dedicated post, so I will refrain from further analysis. What I can say, however, is we need to be more wary of short-term gains and mind long-term effects that cheapen not just the one © but the art form in general. We need to raise music to its rightful state as an art form (this is the “good fight”). We need to invest more into our artists and songwriters rather than onto. We need marketing and branding and whatever other snazzy music conference thematic word you want to use BUT it should be a natural extension of the art rather than the other way around. Now I feel like I’m channeling Lefsetz – let me digress back.

So where does all of this come from? I believe it originates from old questionable practices the record companies used stemming from dated artist-agreement clauses designed to minimize risk around their main, and at the time only, revenue stream – sales. All of which, mind you, have been and continue to be reformed due in large part to the rise of digital. So lay off the current record industry, they are not the real problem here. It is the remains of these past ideals that I am confronting. After all, recorded music is just a blip in music’s history. Spending hours in a store with your friends looking for everything from ABBA to Zappa (bad stylistic mix there but they rhyme and have a nice alphabetic chronology, sorry) was just a blip on that blip. We think that it was always like this, that this is the “best” way to listen to and buy music. But we don’t decide what the best way to consume music is – the consumers do. Stop following yourselves – hell, stop following. 

 

Just like the cavemen who banged their sticks to make music.. only to find eventually they were obselete.. 

So go the 8 track

So go the cassette

So go vinyl (wait, people still buy vinyl)

 

And you too CD... you are gone too... 

 

How is this Walmart's fault?? At least they SELL Cds.

 

Its all digital baby.. accept it before it kills you. Unless youre already dead.. then you can do whatever you want.