RSSVirgin Joins Online Music Fray
by David Worthington
Sir Richard Branson has dabbled in everything from music to hot air ballooning to operating a trans-Atlantic airline - even space tourism. That said, it should come as no surprise that Branson did not want to be the last one on the block to own an online music store.
Branson's Virgin Digital service, which is available as a free download, capitalizes on the strength of the Virgin record label to offer customers a "virtual Virgin Megastore" stocked with over 1 million songs for download.
The Virgin Digital service features music downloads, a music club subscription service, streaming radio, support for over fifty portable music devices, and new music discovery options that are a throw back to the days of the all-knowing record store veteran.
"Virgin stands for innovation, fun, and an absolute dedication to customer value," stated Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group of companies. "We worked directly with passionate music fans around the world and together we’ve come up with a digital music service that truly defines the Virgin energy and spirit. It's time for a digital music revolution!"
Virgin's desktop software is a typical jukebox-style suite that rips, encodes and burns CDs; imports digital audio; creates custom playlists and supports portable music devices that are compatible with Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" software. What is atypical about Virgin Digital software is its rich music discovery features.
Virgin Digital is attempting to bridge the disconnect between itself and its customers by offering an "Ask the Expert" function. The product interfaces directly to customer support where highly knowledgeable salespeople are waiting on the other end of the line to assist customers in their music choices. Another feature Virgin dubs "3-D browsing" fetches related content including album credits and artist biographies.
Unlike iTunes, the market leader, Virgin has opted for a subscription-based pricing model; although, singles can still be downloaded for 99-cents USD each. The Virgin Digital Music Club runs $7.99 USD per month with access to over 100,000 albums on-demand. All users receive complimentary access to Radio Free Virgin. Music is encoded in the Windows Media 9 format.
Jupiter Media Vice President and Senior Analyst David Card has predicted that the early momentum for individual music downloads will eventually be surpassed by subscriptions somewhere within the 2007-2008 timeframe.
"While growing, the market for digital downloads and subscription services is nascent. For the foreseeable future, the CD will remain the entrenched, dominate means by which people consume music. Where stores like iTunes, MSN or Virgin make most sense: Augmenting existing sales channels and offering vendors a way of extending brand awareness," Senior Jupiter Analyst Joe Wilcox told BetaNews.
Wilcox continued, "So for Virgin, the online music store isn't so much about competing with Apple but extending the existing customer experience, by providing another place to discover and consume music. Remember that Virgin has retail stores where the company attempts to build a certain type of community experience and, so, customer loyalty. I see the online store as an attempt to extend the approach to digital downloads and services. Hence, the company refers to the online operation as a 'Virtual Virgin Megastore' where customers can use media player tools to consult with sales staff with music questions or buying advice."
10 Comments
My beef with any online music store is in the quality of music for the price; the quality is not CD quality. CDs give full "CD quality" and you can choose one or more bitrates to sample them down if you wish and still have the CD quality version for another day. CDs are still too expensive for what you are getting by comparison to other forms of media such as DVD movies.
Most online music stores are charging from $.88 to $.99 (or more) per song or $10 (or more) per album. Certainly Virgin does that one better with their monthly subscription price and it would be tempting were it not for their reputation and DRM, BUT then my dander gets in an uproar because it's only available in WMP format.
And even if they did it in the open source OGG format, I would not buy into anything with DRM built in. If I want a digital version of a CD or any song, I would sooner buy the album on CD (as expensive as they are) and rip it myself to high quality mp3, and be able put it on any computer in my house, or on a CD I can listen to in my car or anywhere else for that matter; plus I won't lose the rights to play them if I forget to backup their licenses when Murphy's Law is in full spring, or if my computer goes down due to some nefarious piece of spyware/malware, or viruses, etc, or if I decide to reinstall my OS because of registry rot, or due to an uncompatibility between OSes due to an OS upgrade or because some of my computers are using Linux/UNIX or Mac, or for any other of a bazillion reasons that could come up.
Just my two cents. ;-)
Score: 0
If this service is anything like the standard of service you receive from Virgin.net, I would advise you to be very careful about giving them access to your money.
All I can say is that their people are very poorly trained and you are lucky if you can get an email response within 8 days.
Procrastination seems to be the order of the day so they can get money out of you that they are not entitled to!!!!!
Best advice, try some other service.
Score: 0
Apple's MusicMatch? I thought MusicMatch's owned by Yahoo
Score: 0
Fixed.. We had an HTML issue that distorted what I had written. Thank you for pointing that out.
-DW
Score: 0
No problem
Anyway this Virgin Digital music store is quite good, I mean large, very large music selection (they claim they have 1,000,000), they are powered by MusicNet, I used their AOL service which carried some exclusive artists other subscription-based services don't, and I assume Virgin's the same.
But one thing is that in the BetaNews article, they said this Virgin is a jukebox kind of software that rips, encodes and burns, but I can't really find the rip and encode part, maybe there's a beta of their software going on?
And also, I don't see Virgin Digital available at FileForum.
Score: 0
Jumping into the scene using WM9 format is not what they should be doing. If Virgin were make the library encoded in OGG, I might actually consider buying music through online stores. But no, they had to use the ****** WMA format.
Score: 0
You'll most likely never see OGG supported by any major digital music store until a DRM scheme is created (is there one yet?) and it's supported on portable players.
Score: 0
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to create one even if it's not made yet (which I don't know if one is made or not yet). OGG would be easy to add DRM protection to.
Score: 0
Yeah, I would agree that it wouldn't be too hard to make DRM for OGG files. But as long as point two about portable players isn't resolved, don't hold your breath.
Score: 0
OGG is open source is it not? so its gonna be quite tricky to create DRM for it. What music publisher is gonna trust an open source format not to be 'hacked'. WMV is proven to be secure. Plus my little mp3 player will play wmv's, it won't play ogg.
Score: 0