And the Downloadable Music Wars just keep dragging along. The latest challenger to the iTunes Music Store's throne comes from Wal-Mart, who, according to Reuters, just rolled out its new download service today. Unsurprisingly, it looks pretty much like just about every other non-iTMS service out there: Windows-only, Window Media-based, a 300,000 song catalog, yadda yadda yadda-- we're at the point now where we'd swear they were all created by some insane God of Music Services who ran amuck with a cookie cutter. But that's not to say that Wal-Mart's store doesn't have a differentiating gimmick: its store competes on price, and undercuts the iTMS by (gasp!) eleven cents per song. And that's not all: album downloads are 55 cents cheaper. Why, at our current rate of purchase, switching to Wal-Mart would save us almost enough to buy a pack or two of Juicy Fruit every month or so! Quick, help us trash our Macs and iPods and buy Wintels and Nomads so we can take advantage of these miraculous cost savings!

It's official: we've gotten to the point where we just can't see any of these competing services as even a vague threat to Apple's dominance anymore (eleven-cent discount notwithstanding), because none of them sells songs that can played on the iPod, which we've decided is-- for now, at least-- the absolute dealbreaker when it comes to a genuine shot at success. Things change, granted, but the iPod is becoming so ingrained in our culture that unsupported WMA-based services like Wal-Mart's are fighting a battle so uphill it's practically upside-down, especially with profit margins on song sales as thin as they are.

And yet, we've still got industry players telling the press that it's the other way around: faithful viewer bo notes a CNET article which reports that RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser just said that "Apple is creating problems for itself by using a file format that forces consumers to buy music from Apple's own iTunes site." Says Glaser, "Apple's (market) share will go down if they continue to do this. The only way to presently put songs on an iPod is to (buy) them from iTunes." (Apparently Rob has never heard of these funny little things called "CDs," which you can buy from several sources and which store songs that can subsequently be encoded and transferred to an iPod. But we understand how hard it is to keep abreast of all the latest tech developments.)

Glaser's prediction is that "customers will say, 'I bought an iPod and can only shop at one store. What is this? The Soviet Union?'" Now, we admit ignorance as to the tenets of Stalinism as applied to the freedom to choose from which store to purchase a downloadable copy of "Theme from 'A Summer Place,'" but it seems to us that iPod sales have been climbing, and there hasn't been much, if any, backlash from the twelve people who actually prefer to buy their tunes from WMA-based services like BuyMusic.com and Napster-- probably because they've since been institutionalized as dangers to themselves and others. Does anyone else think this smacks of desperation, à la Napster's CEO "warning" record label execs to "stay off the Apple platform"?

Then again, now that Wal-Mart's got that eleven-cent discount thing going, there may well be riots in the streets from iPod owners who demand their free packs of gum. Here's hoping that Apple offers a reasonable compromise by letting the other stores license its FairPlay Digital Rights Management system so that they can all ditch Windows Media and sell iPod-compatible protected AACs just like the iTMS does. After all, that completely addresses Rob's concern, right? That oughta make him real happy.