2000s in the music industry Inc.), who surpassed Wal-Mart to become the US’s largest music retailer in April 2008. Sector leaders include: Many hundreds more stores operate worldwide, often prominent only in particular countries or specialist genres. A third kind of operator never retails directly to the public, instead offering branded whitelabel stores and portals for organisations including bricks-and-mortar music stores, mobile telephony operators and ISPs. Some services which initially only offered streaming of tracks now also offer a-la-carte downloads, either through third parties (e.g. Spotify) or fully integrated (Deezer, Juno Digital, Rhapsody etc.). In 2009 "Rolling Stone" reported a price war between iTunes and
Deezer December 2011, Deezer, at the time available only in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, announced plans to expand worldwide during the rest of 2011 and continuing into 2012. According to the company, it planned to make its services available to the whole of Europe by the end of the year, to the Americas (excluding the United States) by the end of January 2012, to Africa and Southeast Asia by the end of February, and the rest of the world (excluding Japan) by the end of June. It took until 15 March 2012 for service to be available across the