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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.
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?
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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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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.
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?
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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.
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The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience. If you are the type that would pay $15 / month for access to nearly every single song ever recorded and don't give two shits if you 'own' it or not, subscription services work fine. People who pick subscriptions view music the same way they view the Internet. They want it there, they want access to it all the time, and if one day their service goes under they just go out and get another one. Sure, all your music is 'gone'... except for the fact that you can merrily go and redownload anything your cared about in a day or two's time with a new service. If you are the type of music listener that goes through piles of artists each month and like to listen to anything that might catch your fancy, subscription services are a steal.
If on the other hand you are the type who has a narrow focus in music, like just a few artists, listen to the same albums over and over, listen to music rarely, or get your rocks off collecting things, than clearly a subscription plan is not for you. Most of the services that offer music subscription services offer both models for the very reason that while the average human has one testicle and one fully developed breast, the average human is not who you are trying to sell to. It makes perfect sense to sell single songs and albums to the type who get off on that sort of thing, and to sell subscription plans to those who get off on that.
For me personally, the subscription works very well. My interest in music is far too casual to justify researching music before I buy it. My tastes wander too quickly, and they are far too fickle. I don't often listen to musicians more than a few times, and I enjoy the exploration of different genera and artists far more than I enjoy listening to a few tried and trued favorites. For me, a music subscription works wonderfully. I get full access to any song I could want to listen to, and I nothing about downloading something and listening to it because I have already paid a flat rate.
If the only option out there was iTunes style pay-per-download, I probably would not bother buying music at all. I might be the minority, but Rhapsody is getting my buck while iTunes isn't simply because they offer it and iTunes doesn't.
The DRM issue is a whole different can of worms. Access controls on subscription services make sense. Access controls that can be killed for things you pay a buck per pop for is just downright stupid. You are a moron if you pay for DRMed single shot music. The whole point of BUYING the music instead of just subscribing to it is the assurance that your collection will always be there.
Personally, I think you take your chances when you buy DRMed music with the expectation of keeping it forever. iTunes, Virgin, Rhapsody... whoever, if they DRM the music, than they ultimately have control of that music. If you are paying for control of that music, you damn well should make sure you actually have it.
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.
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