Wal-Mart, Again, Is Evil

So my friend sends me a link to an article about Wal-Mart opening it's own online music store similar to the Apple iTunes Music Store. He's excited because it has all three albums from our fiddle/mandolin teacher's old band, New Vintage, and he and I have been looking for those CDs.

Myself, I'm dubious. I mean, c'mon, Wal-Mart? Champion of massive profits, exploiter of the little man, and even worse -- they play this sick game of making the little man love them. It's a serious "love to be beaten" sort of mentality. Evil.

And here they extend to me a fruit from the Forbidden Tree -- the songs of my mentor, that I really want to own. Hmm.... Dare I? Should I go and check it out? I decided to look into it anyway. Here's what I find:

1) It's really cool they have the New Vintage albums. That's a serious surprise, even the Apple iTunes Store doesn't have them. More's the pity.

2) They're using the exact same sharing privileges as the iTunes Music Store, which is good. Basically: you can share the songs with up to three computers, can burn an unchanged playlist up to ten times, and can upload to an unlimited number of MP3 players. All good stuff.

3) However, they only support Windows Media Player and Windows Operating Systems They explicitly say, "Music downloads from Walmart.com will not play on any Apple Macintosh computer." What?

So in closing, as usual, Wal-Mart is evil, and they can continue to kiss my white ass.