Market Power in Music Retailing: The Case of Wal‐Mart

The retailing of pre-recorded music has been an area of investigation that has long been neglected by popular music researchers. This paper focuses on the world’s largest music retailer, Wal-Mart, and its impact on traditional chain and independent music retailers. Many of the compact discs sold by Wal-Mart are sold as loss-leaders to attract consumers to buy other products. The response of traditional retailers to Wal-Mart and other massmarket discounters, i.e. minimum advertised price programs, is examined—as is the inability of traditional music retailers to claim that Wal-Mart is engaging in predatory pricing. I then examine the impact of Wal-Mart on the censorship of music. The paper concludes with some directions for future research, including a call for an examination of how traditional retailers can effectively compete against mass-market discounters.