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Virgin Digital To Close Up Shop
mrspin writes in to note the demise of the Virgin Digital music store. Here is Virgin's announcement. It will shut down in stages: the service closed its doors to new subscribers on Friday; current subscribers will lose all access to it when their next monthly payment is due or on Oct. 19, whichever comes first. The store advises customers who have purchased downloads to back them up to CD and re-import them as MP3. It used to discourage such DRM-evading tactics.
Well, there's a hole that will need to be filled.
mrspin writes in to note the demise of Virgin Digital
That's because the digital media that people are searching for involving Virgins isn't what they were offering.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
How about they provide non-DRM mp3 downloads so people can dump their collections before their lost, rather than making more lossy copies?
I haven't used Virgin's store, so I'm not familiar with the license that users signed. But isn't it reasonable to expect that Virgin has to provide a more direct method for users that have paid for their downloaded content to obtain a permanent copy of it? "Burn it to CD and rip it back" seems arduous and probably not even feasible for the level of computer literacy they should expect from their clients.
Would such an argument even hold up in court?
If you can't find a real troll, just mod down whoever you don't agree with!
Okay.
... the gigantic building?
So they have this huge stockpile of music, and they're incapable of simply posting it and running a credit-card outsourced solution?
The artists get the 8 cents per sale, right? So the rest pays for
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Sony Connect store did the same, but they were switching from a propriety format to something based on windows media.
Even they recommended the burn to CD and re-rip method, but the problem with that is the horrible loss of quality. The downloaded tracks are already lossy encoded. The lost data is not recreated by burning it to CD. And you will be ripping it back into a lossy format, from a source thats already lossy.
In my opinion, they should make available a tool that strips the DRM but leave the audio data pretty much intact.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Most companies I've encountered that DRM their content claim that if they ever go out of business that they'll keep their activation servers going, transfer the activation to a third party, or better yet, release a key/patch to permanently "free" the content.
Never seems to happen, though.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
If anyone runs into authorization problems for those songs, especially on the computer where they were originally purchased. "Pay money to buy a song and we may revoke your access at some unspecified, arbitrary short time" is not a valid contract term. Going CD-RW -> MP3 route is not a solution since the company previously claimed that it would be illegal.
This is why software/content as a service is bollocks.
The possibility of the company going out of business is regularly cited as a reason against DRM, because it leaves your purchases worthless.
This is an example of it happening in reality.
People are going to have to either waste CD-R's or loose quality by reencoding them to another lossy format... really abismal.
I don't get it. Why can't they just make available a program that strips their DRM from the music files, and let their subscribers download and use said program? This would be much easier than burning and ripping. Plus, you don't lose any more quality than you already have.
With the ENTER VIGIN DIGITAL (sic) text on it.
Clunky, complicated, hideous to look at and use websites. Payment methods just asking to be abused, or designed to turn away the many people who choose life without credit cards.
Just try and purchase, say, a CD or book online. Direct bank funds transfer? Nope. Gotta be a credit card. Then try and actually use a credit card at a site like Think Geek, where they ask you to supply digital photos of your drivers licences, a recent bill, etc.
For those of us in (very) rural locations, the choice is either give up and buy stuff from a brick-and-mortar store the next time you're in a town, or leap through the flaming online hoops and risk becoming the victim of identity theft as a result...but only if you're willing to have a credit card.
Those who claim DRM is nothing but the "lock to your door" or "the alarm in your" car are going to have a hard time trying justify their business model when things like this end up happening...
While it does mean you lose those particular tracks, the mentality I keep hearing from people I would expect to know better is, in a world where everyone has enough bandwidth to stream radio 24/7, nobody cares that you've lost your music collection.
You just switch to a different, competing service, and re-download everything.
The guy I had this conversation with reasoned it like this: If you're going legit, this is the cheapest way. You lose the ability to have stuff work on an iPod, but he had something else anyway. Everything he wanted to do with it, the DRM software let him do -- except play it on Linux, which he didn't want anyway (partly because it didn't work on Linux -- chicken and egg).
And the economics of it: He calculated that he'd have to subscribe to this service for 15 years straight before he'd be spending more than it would cost to buy the stuff outright on iTunes or CD. And that was just counting songs he'd already downladed -- obviously, in 15 years, he'd be downloading a lot more stuff.
Me, I'm not willing to give up my freedom like that, and stuff just has to work on Linux. Besides, I listen to a lot of Internet radio. But content as a service really isn't a problem. Software as a service, maybe, because you have your own data attached to it, but music? Who are we kidding?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"If you are a current Club member you will be able to continue using the service until the date that your next payment is due, after which the service will no longer be accessible to you."
Nothing about it stopping before your subscription runs out.
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Apple seem to be the only people who've managed a paid digital music store with any success. eMusic has been going forever without any real traction, Napster continues to lose money, meanwhile you can get free, legal major label music from places like imeem.com which is all ad supported.
I was sure this Virgin Store was an iTunes killer. Differential pricing, backed by a major record label, subscription and purchase options, not restricted to an iPod.
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Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to misread it.
Just what is it about the iTunes Store that's so hard to grasp? Put up a store that sells a huge selection of music at half-decent prices with halfway-tolerable DRM, and the world beats a path to your door.
Put up a store that rents a limited selection of music at lousy prices and heavy-handed DRM, and the world yawns. That business model has now been tried at least a dozen times and has failed every single time.
There are other kinds of products for which a manufacturer would refuse to sell through the only store that's successfully sold that product, and instead sets up its own store--but music is the only product for which they set up stores that emulate, not the successful store, but the unsuccessful stores.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It sure didn't happen with the $300 worth of DRMed, encrypted content I purchased for my GemStar eBook.
That content is keyed to a hardware serial number in my own, personal eBook device.
The servers were shut down, the customer service people who could have enabled the content to work on a different eBook device are gone, but it doesn't matter anyway because there are no follow-on devices that use that encryption scheme.
No provision was made for freeing the content, there's no equivalent of "burning to CD and re-RIPping), and when my vintage 2000 eBook--which has started to act funny--finally dies, all the content I purchased dies with it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No one wants disappearing music. If it were otherwise, Virgin would not be closing. Not even M$ could sell it and everyone who bought into it is either evil or a fool.
Fee services are greedy and won't work. According to this BBC story, people spend about $25/year on music. Plans that ask for this amount per month or multiples of it per year are doomed to fail.
The industry and the law itself has been harmed by the Copyright extremists. Laws that transparently guard the interest of a few at the expense of many have bred contempt. The theft of thousands of people's life savings by bogus prosecutions have only made things worse. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This is the reason I won't rent music. I don't know much about their model, but the risk that my music "landlord" will got out of business, leaving me in the lurch, is why I won't rent music.
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Do they really say users should rip to MP3? All I'm seeing are suggestions that you back up your collection since you won't be able to re-download them. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
The real question is how are the tracks locked to a given purchaser? If you need to authenticate to some Virgin Digital service when you, say, move to a new computer, then there is a problem.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
eMusic no traction? They are the second largest digital music retailer. The #1 largest DRM-free retailer and probably the only major digital retailer with (recently updated) Linux support. It's a great resource for slightly older music or anything even remotely off the beaten path (my main interest).
Quack, quack.
Most people are not serious enough audio listeners to notice any difference between re-ripped stuff and the originals. You have to remember the equipment most people use to listen to music is not that great either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Time and again we have seen that if there is any choice at all, people don't want subscriptons where they pay to access some nebulous "service". They want something they can keep, even if it's a virtual "something".
People also dislike differental pricing as it usually ends up being "differential" the wrong way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have to say that with the size of iTunes customer base, I would think that currently Apple is actually the largest DRM free music store in terms of percent sold going forward... but I can't find any figures to say one way or the other.
Basically though it's just great to see the number of DRM free options growing!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And with other resources (Bleep, Fintunes, Inertia, etc) I find my music selection keeps expanding horizontally (and DRM free).
Quack, quack.
of a company failing to replicate Apple's success with DRM-managed downloads. There's only one MS Office, there's only one iPod. Deal with it. Apple's learned how to play nice with MS Office, when will other media download site learn the same (painful) lesson that you ignore the iPod only at your own peril?
Any (legal) media company that doesn't take the iPod into account is doomed to failure or at least irrelevance. The only one to succeed and flourish in a post-iPod world is eMusic, and that's because you can play songs from there on a your iPod or Zune (shudder) or whatever.
Wal-Mart is opening up their DRM, so is Amazon. NBC, however, is still clueless.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"I bought the song with DRM from Virgin, and then they went out of business. I am just exercising my license to have one copy after the first one got lost in a freak lightning storm." What's that? Now it was a copy and not a license? Great to hear!
iTunes has captured what, about 2% of digital music downloads? Not sales - they probably have most of those, but downloads.
It doesn't surprise me that the 3% of people willing to pay are being fought over by the music distributors. Unfortunately iTunes doesn't have to make money. Apple was saying this over and over when it started but you don't hear about this much anymore. iTunes is a vehicle for filling up iPods, not for selling digital music.
It wouldn't surprise me if nearly every company trying to actually sell digital music completely folded up. Why? Because most people have no reason to want to pay for music anymore. They can get what they want for free, without restriction.
The idea of paying someone to download music might work, if it wasn't so expensive. What would 3,000 or 4,000 songs cost? At iTunes it would be $30,000 or more. Right. That's going to happen.
It's simple. Don't rent music. It's so cheap and easy, that even a minor geek can keep a permanent music collection. It's simple:
1. Throw two or three (or more for the paranoid) cheap 500 GB hard drives in an old thrift store quality PC. Install FreeNas.
2. Buy CD's used and cheap.
3. Rip to FLAC.
4. Set up Freenas to mirror, or backup occasionally.
Bammo! Dirt cheap, very permanent, perfect music library! Because you're smart and used FLAC, you can always burn a perfect copy of any CD you'd like from your own collection. The chances of multiple hard drives failing at the same time is slim, so as long as you replace hard drives when they fail, there's very little chance of losing any of your collection.
My point is that it's cheap and easy. There's very little reason to rent music these days.
I don't respond to AC's.
Near the top:
The terms and conditions below apply to you if you use any of the Virgin Digital service (as more particularly set out in paragraph 5 and the Virgin Digital Player which is the software platform from which subscribers operate the services), the terms and conditions also governs the use of the Website itself....
Your use of this Website, the Virgin Digital Player and the Virgin Digital service are subject to these terms and conditions. By using this Website, the Virgin Digital Player and/or any of the Virgin Digital service, you acknowledge your consent to them.
Virgin reserves the right at its sole discretion, to change, modify, add or remove any part(s) of these terms and conditions without notice. It is important (and your responsibility) to check these terms and conditions periodically for any changes. Changes will be posted here. Your continued use of the Website or the Virgin Digital Player or the Virgin Digital service following the posting of any changes will constitute your acceptance of the changes.
And further down...:4. SERVICE LICENCES
The following sets out the licences which Virgin is granting you in order to use the Virgin Digital service as set out in Paragraph 5 below.
4.1 Content Licence
Virgin grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence ("Content Licence") to download or stream digital music content ("Content") to your personal computer or Portable Device (as defined in paragraph 5 below and subject to your rights under these terms and conditions) solely for your personal non-commercial use. You shall not (without limitation) copy, reproduce, "rip", distribute or use the Content in any other manner, save as permitted by these terms and conditions.
And further down yet:
5. SERVICE DESCRIPTION AND USAGE
...
5.1.3 "Purchased Download" A Track downloaded to the hard drive of your computer which can either be burned to a CD or transferred to a portable device subject to the following usage rules: (a) Purchased Downloads may be transferred to portable devices, which shall mean a hardware device with software (including embedded software) ("Portable Device") which enables you to export Permitted Downloads from a personal computer for play back on a Portable Device in accordance with the provisions of these terms and conditions. (b) You can make up to seven (7) burns per individual playlist (i.e. your chosen selection of Tracks in one (1) particular order). (c) You can transfer any single Purchased Download to up to five (5) secure portable devices up to twenty-five (25) times. PLEASE NOTE that any attempt to circumvent any controls that we have in place to prevent additional burning and/or transfers outside of your permitted rights will be a breach of these terms and conditions and may result in the immediate termination of your Virgin Account and may also subject you to civil and/or criminal liability.
And finally...:
15.3 In the event of a direct conflict or inconsistency between these terms and conditions and privacy policy and other terms and conditions that may be applicable to the Website or the Services these terms and conditions shall prevail to the extent that such conflict relates to your use of the Services and/or Website.
15.4 The failure of Virgin to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these terms and conditions will not constitute a waiver of such right or provision.
Emphasis mine
So basically, Virgin can tell you whatever the hell you want to hear, with regards to how to handle the music you've downloaded. The only caveat is that it's non-binding and that the terms in their "Terms and Conditions" section hold up in court.
And gave the same suggestions, at least they are keeping the store online for a year so people are able to redownload any of their music and be able to back it up.
I don't get it... If it is so easy, and legal to strip the DRM from music rented from iTunes, you should be twice as pissed as if it you couldn't remove the DRM. They have added hoops for you to jump through for absolutely no reason. If the DRM stripping is legal and simple, then the only possible reason for the DRM in the first place is that Apple hopes that a certain percentage of people will slip up in bypassing the hoops, and have to pay a second or third time for the same product. Either that, or they are trying to cause problems for their customers if they don't also buy an iPod. Really. You should be MORE pissed at Apple for their DRM. Not less.
To all those posters pontificating on the reason this business has failed, you should know that Virgin has just sold its Megastores in a management buyout.
Maybe the new owners of all things musical in Virgin don't see any profit in maintaining the online music store ?
And even if the online store was to remain outside of the buyout, Virgin Media have been making moves towards being a *big* media company for some time now (broadband, cable tv, mobile & landline telephony). Maybe there is no room for online music sales in that future. Control the infrastructure, let others worry about the consumables.
They probably are legally required to provide permanent copies of the music or provide all customers with refunds, but I'm sure it will take a lawsuit to make them comply.
Half the stuff written in EULAs is just wishful thinking. Most countries have consumer protection laws that trump EULAs.
If the law says that Virgin cannot intentionally sell people a defective product, then they can't simply shut off this service. They need to provide their customers with refunds.
Dumping all his Music Stores ! The rest of the newly sold retail empire is probably just as fucked.
So what? It shields you from liability for breaking it (unclean hands doctrine), regardless of what their contract says. There's long standing that you can't make public statements like that if you want any damages.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am waiting for Virgins to open up shop.
The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience.
The market has to be bigger than your mom for the service to really work. Really, most people would take $15 a month and buy a CD, but no one is really spending that kind of money and that's why these services continue to fail. The music industry would be very happy indeed if they could convince people to spend ten times what they currently do, give them nothing better than broadcast radio and keep them hooked into it with restrictions that hork their computer and music at the same time.
The money is not there and digital restrictions are not going to wring it out of people, get over it. The point of the RIAA is to promote music and they have always done so by giving people "free" samples via commercial radio. The public expects more, not less for their money. Pandora is a nice substitute but the RIAA is going to have to make room for competition because the internet is not the scarce commodity broadcast media was and the RIAA is not going to be able to own it the same way.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
...Amazon.com opens up their new music download store TODAY.
Unlike Virgin's store, the Amazon digital music files use non-DRM'd MP3 file encoded at 256 kbps variable bit rate, which means high quality sound good enough that to tell the difference against the original file you'll need stereo equipment that costs way beyond the means of most consumers.
desktop provider. And it pays.
Quack, quack.
But the variety was never there. I've bought music through them but I rely on sites that can offer more.
Quack, quack.
Yeah, I've been browsing it for a few hours. Nice stuff. I refused to do ITunes/IPod because of DRM and now my little Zen player is getting packed full of nice, legal, piano sonatas for reasonable prices. Amazon has a much better chance of competing with ITunes than anyone else, and if they fail and close up shop? Big deal, I can still play my MP3s without having to burn and rip. Now if only they'd sell some Rie Fu tracks...
These services don't "continue to fail". Virgin is the first such service that I know of that failed due to financial hardship.
There are no successful consumer rent-a-song services. Sony has failed and Microsoft abandoned it's entire "Plays for Sure" market when it launched the Zune, which is another failure. Every college service paid for by student fees is neglected and many have been withdrawn.
Broadcast radio in your area must be very remarkable because never in my entire life has my radio played exactly (or any) of what I want to here without commercials when I want to hear it.
No, it's awful everywhere, but your rent-a-song service will be too when they have people hooked. It's not like the industry will do anything different once they have things locked up again. If everyone was on some kind of rental program, they would continue to limit variety and sell you the difference separately. That's the way the RIAA model works. It's not about promoting talent, it's about creating scarcity.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So, you can shake your fists all you want about how subscription is the devils doing and will never work... while I will merrily go indulge in a sudden urge for 90's ska and go download a few albums to listen to later.