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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.
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.
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.
They should just liquidate the whole stock on the cheap. After all, digital music is akin to tangible objects, as seen in the RIAA's 'You wouldn't steal a car' argument, so what's the problem with just selling off the whole supply to whomever for whatever they'll go for?
I say this half jokingly, but we are talking about the same people who replaced their records with tapes, tapes with CD's, video's with DVD's and some of them went through mini disks, laser disks VCD's and betamax too, some people replace their PC's entirely because someone at a PC shop tells them they need X to run the next version of office (according to PC World (UK) a dual core Pentium and 2Gb of RAM are required to "write letters" and browse the web, apparently because there have recently been upgrades (to the net) and there is a new version coming out soon). Replacing your media library every few years seems to be OK by most people, people actually do!.
Saying that maybe this will be the generation that say "no more".
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!
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.
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
It's still not the same product.
Your new lossless (yet still lossy) file is 30mb+. The original product purchased was a lossy audio file with a small file size, probably to be used on an digital audio player, with a storage capacity of let's say 1GB.
Not only do I now have a different product, but now I cannot use it in the same way as promised when I purchased it. Going back to my original analogy, now the CD-R's the store sent me are actually mini-discs.
I know of one case where a failed DRM distribution system did not result in everyone losing their stuff. You may be aware that the PC game Prey was originally released on a content delivery service known as Triton, who went out of business several months after the release. So the developers of the game sent a proper retail copy of the game to everyone who'd purchased it on Triton.
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!