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Apple's iTunes Store isn't the only one that has adjusted prices for its digital song downloads recently: Changes are showing up at Amazon's and Wal-Mart's online music stores, too.

Apple Inc. ( AAPL - news - people ), the dominant digital music retailer on the Internet, shifted Tuesday from selling all songs for 99 cents apiece to a tiered pricing model where songs cost 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 each. Recording companies are choosing the prices.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple also eliminated the copy-protection technology that limited users' abilities to copy and play songs on devices other than Apple's own iPods.

On the same day Apple made its changes, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ( WMT - news - people )'s online music store began selling tunes for $1.24, 94 cents and 64 cents apiece. Previously, they cost 74 cents and 94 cents apiece.

In an e-mail, Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala said the pricing adjustments are "reflective of new costs set by the music industry."

Elsewhere on the Web, Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc. ( AMZN - news - people ) is also selling individual song downloads for as much as $1.29. Most songs currently cost $1.29, 99 cents, 89 cents or 69 cents each. Amazon did not say when it began selling songs for $1.29; when the store first opened in September 2007, songs sold for 89 cents and 99 cents.

Wal-Mart and Amazon downloads had already been free of copy protection.

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The cash-strapped masses may be spending less on restaurants and entertainment, but not necessarily on the quality of their sex lives--and manufacturers of sexual aids are broadening their lines to meet the demand.

To wit: Trojan now offers a condom that comes with a disposable vibrating ring. Durex, another condom maker, sells a vibrator and a line of lubricants. Even Philips Electronics (nyse: PHG - news - people ) has joined competitor Hitachi (nyse: HIT - news - people ) in the vibrator business. "We're much more open now to experimenting sexually," says Louis Friedman, chief executive of Liberator, a maker of sex toys in Atlanta. "We’re seeing countless new products being sold to a much larger audience than people realized. Even the more conservative retailers have begun to come around."

Indeed, Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), Walgreen (nyse: WAG - news - people ) and Target (nyse: TGT - news - people ) now peddle sexual aids, including condoms, lubricants and personal massagers. Walgreen's Web site features a "sexual wellness" tab, behind which are listed not only contraceptives and fertility tests, but also pleasure-enhancing dietary supplements, romance-themed costumes and games, massage oils and lotions, and the "Emotional Bliss Femblossom" vibrator. (Representatives from Walgreen's and Target were unavailable for comment; a Wal-Mart communications manager would say only that the chain "has a diverse mix of shoppers who visit our stores each day, and we are committed to providing customers with the selection of products they expect to find in our stores.")

In Pictures: The Mainstreaming of the Sex Industry

Poor as we all may feel lately, it seems there's at least one bright spot in having to hunker down at home. "This industry is shielded in a way," says Katy Zvolerin, director of public relations with Adam & Eve, another sex toy maker. "It does seem people use us even more heavily in bad times." (Not that there's much of a correlation between recessions and birth rates--if people have more sex during a recession, they are being careful about it.)

Chad Braverman, director of product development and licensing at Doc Johnson, takes a more sober approach to the coming months. "I don't know if I'd say our industry was 'recession-proof,'" he says. "We need to be proactive in creating a quality product that's going to sell. And there's a lot more competition than there was 20 years ago."

The sex industry traces back to 500 B.C., when traders from the Greek port of Miletus sold olisbos, an early version of the dildo. Today, the business of sex (including pornography) now runs into the tens of billions of dollars. (No official estimates are available; Wall Street analysts don't tend to track this stuff.) And while print and video sales are ebbing, as more free adult content has become available online, sales of un-reproducible sexual aids are still healthy.

This is a transcript of the Market Update: Afternoon Outlook.

Police were reviewing video from surveillance cameras in an attempt to identify who trampled to death a Wal-Mart worker after a crowd of post-Thanksgiving shoppers burst through the doors at a suburban store and knocked him down.

Criminal charges were possible, but identifying individual shoppers in Friday's video may prove difficult, said Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, a Nassau County police spokesman.

Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers stepped over him and became irate when officials said the store was closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

At least four other people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals for observation or minor injuries. The store in Valley Stream on Long Island closed for several hours before reopening.

Police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) doors before its 5 a.m. opening at a mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the employee, identified by police as Jdimytai Damour, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.

"This crowd was out of control," Fleming said. He described the scene as "utter chaos," and said the store didn't have enough security.

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said. Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store.

Yet Ten Sleep, population 350, is just as connected as any place these days, and home to a new company that is outsourcing jobs not from the United States to the Far East, but in the opposite direction.

Eleutian Technology hires people in towns across northern Wyoming to teach English to Koreans of all ages using Skype, the free online calling and person-to-person video service. Two years old, Eleutian already is one of Wyoming's fastest-growing businesses.

The company has close to 300 teachers hooked up to more than 15,000 students in Korea, and CEO Kent Holiday said he's just getting started.

"Our plan was never to be a company that had a few thousand subscribers," Holiday said. "It's a $100 billion market just between Korea, Japan and China, and so we wanted to be the leader and we wanted to have millions of users."

Holiday got the idea for the company after a short stint teaching English in Korea in the early 1990s. He went to work in Korea's telecommunications industry and eventually became a top executive of Korea Telecom (nyse: KTC - news - people ).

All along, he kept in mind that language education someday would be possible online. He made his move in 2006, getting grief from friends about quitting his high-six-figures job. "I said `You know what? The time's right,'" he said.

Maoming, Wuhu and Loudi.

They're Chinese cities so far in the boonies that Lonely Planet doesn't even bother to mention them in its popular travel guide. But Wal-Mart has found them, as the company makes an aggressive push into China's smaller markets.

China's economic growth is rapidly spreading out from the main cities like Beijing and Shanghai into the hinterlands, where the middle class is taking off. In a report last year, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney said 75 percent of the middle market is expected to be in tier-two and tier-three cities by 2017.

These cities are "small" only by the standards of a country with 1.3 billion people. For example, Wuhu in eastern China has 2.3 million people and Maoming in the south has 6.8 million, providing a strong consumer base as incomes rise.

In response, retailers are pushing into the hinterlands, including American coffee chain Starbucks Corp. and French store Carrefour SA. Carrefour, the world's second-largest retailer after Wal-Mart, is the largest foreign retailer in China.

Faced with saturated markets at home, these retailers are increasingly looking to emerging economies such as China to drive sales growth. Wal-Mart's attempt to gain a bigger foothold in China is anchored in smaller cities: Only three of the 30 outlets Wal-Mart Stores Inc. opened in China last year were in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen. The rest were in provincial capitals or other cities.

"I think the capacity for growth in China might exceed that of the U.S., if you look at it in the long term," Terrence Cullen, Wal-Mart's vice president of development in China, said in an interview in his office in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown across the border from Hong Kong.

Wal-Mart said its China sales rose 32.2 percent in the second quarter, while international sales overall were up 16.9 percent.

But experts warn there are risks in smaller markets. People are not as well-off, so it's harder to turn a profit. Local suppliers may be less reliable, a concern in a country plagued by quality scandals, including the recent discovery of contaminated baby formula blamed for killing four infants and making thousands sick.

Moreover, the big-bang growth strategy -- opening stores across China -- requires a bigger investment than the gradual expansion the company pursued in the U.S.

Two of the newest stores are in Loudi (pronounced lou-DEE), a steel and mining town of 4 million people in central China. It's just down the road from Shaoshan, the birthplace of late leader Mao Zedong -- who would likely be horrified to hear that a flagship of American capitalism has moved into his neighborhood.

At one of the new Loudi Wal-Marts, a woman in blue overalls greets shoppers. The sprawling, brightly lit and spotlessly clean store has the same general look and feel of one of the company's well-stocked, wide-aisled stores in the U.S.

But a few steps inside, it becomes clear that Wal-Mart is trying to deliver everyday low prices with Chinese characteristics.

The smoky scent of thick slabs of dried smoked pork piled high in a display case mixes with that of laundry detergent and plastic. There are foreign brands: Raid roach killer, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Budweiser beer and "pesto Italiano" flavored Pringles potato chips. But there are also bins of reddish-brown dried squid and vacuum-packed packages of preserved Wuchang fish, one of Mao's favorites.

"I come here all the time," said Chen Yatian, a 21-year-old engineering student. "The prices aren't higher than the small shops outside, and I think the quality is better. My friends and I buy all our snacks here, things like spicy dried tofu."

The need to satisfy sharply different regional tastes is one of the challenges Wal-Mart faces in smaller markets, said Dean Xu, professor of strategy and international business at the University of Hong Kong. Wal-Mart will have to source many goods from local suppliers, potentially raising quality issues. "If there is one incident, it can ruin your company's reputation," Xu said.

Still, Wal-Mart's Cullen says the expansion is a logical step as China's middle class swells and the economy becomes driven more by consumers than exports. Major markets have their drawbacks too, he added.

"The big cities are very difficult to do business in for all the obvious reasons: They're crowded. It's difficult to find real estate. It's expensive and there's competition," said Cullen, who previously helped rival Costco Wholesale Corp. break into South Korea and Taiwan.

In the United States, Wal-Mart started with a single store in Arkansas in 1962 and built up its distribution network slowly, opening stores in adjacent counties and avoiding big leaps, said Emek Basker, a University of Missouri economics professor who has done extensive research on Wal-Mart's growth. The company had a conscious policy to open outlets only within a day's drive of its distribution centers, she said.

Wal-Mart declined to comment on whether it would be scaling back its international expansion plans amid the global financial crisis.

Wal-Mart is being outmaneuvered by Carrefour because its executives have taken too long to understand the China market and add stores, said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of retail consulting firm Strategic Resource Group. Carrefour, with $4.3 billion in sales, ranked sixth among all retailers in China in 2007, according to the China Chain Store & Franchise Association. Its sales were up 24 percent over the previous year.

Wal-Mart was 13th, with sales of $3.1 billion, a 42 percent increase over the previous year. The American chain also owns a 35 percent stake in Trust-Mart, which operates about 100 stores in 34 Chinese cities.

At the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Loudi, homemaker Zhang Xiaoling, 32, said the store with the lowest prices would get her business.

"I always come here. I think the selection is great and the prices are fair," Zhang said, as she struggled to keep her 2-year-old son from wandering away. "There was a small supermarket just down the road. When Wal-Mart opened, it closed. It just couldn't compete."

A few blocks away, in the dark and dingy basement of a dilapidated building, most of the merchants at a traditional food market appeared blase about the new competitor.

Shau Youming, who sells spices and soy sauce in a small stall, said Wal-Mart hasn't hurt his business.

"I've got my old customers and they all live nearby," he said. "It's convenient for them to come here. My prices aren't high and I keep an eye on Wal-Mart's prices. I'm not trying to make a lot of money. Just enough to make a living."