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.

Comments

Why can't they just remove their DRM?

[r_jensen11]

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.

Why not imitate success instead of failure?

[dpbsmith]

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.

People Don't Buy Restricted Music.

[Erris]

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.