An important message to all customers of Walmart’s MP3 store has started going out via email.

Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases

We hope you are enjoying the increased music quality/bitrate and the improved usability of Walmart’s MP3 music downloads. We began offering MP3s in August 2007 and have offered only DRM (digital rights management) -free MP3s since February 2008. As the final stage of our transition to a full DRM-free MP3 download store, Walmart will be shutting down our digital rights management system that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site.

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

Thank you for using Walmart.com for music downloads. We are working hard to make our store better than ever and easier to use.

Walmart Music Team

For those unsure what this means DRM (Digital Rights Management)is a form of copy protection encoded onto digital files to make sure that you are unable to play them except on devices you have authorized.  Consumers have spoken out loudly against this practice because it can cause issues with playing the music as they see fit across multiple devices, just as you can with a CD.

For those of you who are confused by what exactly they are telling you to do, all you need to do is copy the DRM protected files to a CD as music, NOT as files.  Once you do this, you can play these CDs as you would any normal CD, or you can convert them back to digital files, and because you do it yourself, they will lose their copy protection.  You should, however, expect some loss in audio quality.  It is not a perfect solution, but at least it keeps you from being totally unable to play the songs.

As the email states, you need to do this prior to October 9th when they shut down the servers.