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 of just 875,000 euros, not enough to pay its licensing fees. In July 2008, the company began running ads itself through advertising agency Deezer Media; in October, Deezer secured $8.4 million in funding from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Prive, bringing total investment in the company to $15.8 million. The company introduced mandatory registration in February 2009 to gather more precise data on users, in order to run more targeted ads, and in November 2009 began running audio ads between songs. On 5 November 2009, Deezer launched a new three-tier service model. While continuing basic free web streaming, the