It was announced Tuesday that Best Buy, your big box destination for DVDs, crappy CDs and home electronics, will soon be selling guitars, drums, amplifiers and other musical accouterments…you know, things young people used to care  about. I personally don’t see myself buying some shitty Jay Turser SG knockoff from a guy in khaki slacks and royal blue collared shirt, but hey, I’m probably not their target audience (which is presumably kids coming into the store with their moms and all of a sudden deciding that they want a Fender Strat instead of whatever video game they were initially after).  Guitar Center is probably really, really stoked at this announcement.

From the Associated Press:

The nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer will announce Tuesday that it plans to open as many as 85 of the music centers inside its stores by the end of the year and could add even more locations in the future, executives told The Associated Press.

Each site will use about 2,500 square feet of retail space and include roughly 1,000 different products with well-known brand names such as Fender, Gibson, Drum Workshop and Roland.

“We’re not just extending the shelf space in the store, we’re creating a designated area specifically for this experience,” said Kevin Balon, the company’s vice president of musical instruments. “And we’re trying to create an authentic and genuine musical instrument store look and feel inside of Best Buy.”

In what will probably the beginning of the end of the HD DVD format, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and architects of the Deathstar, has joined Netflix and Best Buy in backing the Blu-ray high-definition DVD format. To be fair, poor HD DVD really never stood a chance. The format was backed by Toshiba, while Blu-ray has Sony — and it’s library of 4,000,000,000 films (estimated figure) — in its corner.

According to Wal-Mart’s resident blogger (I wonder what that pays) Susan Chronister:

“So … if you bought the HD player like me, I’d retire it to the bedroom, kid’s playroom, or give it to your parents to play their John Wayne standard def movies, and make space for a BD (Blu-ray disc) player for your awesome Hi Def experience.”

Ouch. Look at this way, if you always wanted an Xbox 360, which currently only supports HD DVD, now might be the time to get one cheap.