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Virgin Digital To Close Up Shop
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 24, 2007 06:37 PM
from the left-from-itunes-and-a-right-from-drm dept.
from the left-from-itunes-and-a-right-from-drm dept.
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.
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Submission: Virgin Digital To Close - DRM Strikes Back Again by Anonymous Coward
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Virgins closing shop? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Virgins closing shop? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re-import to Mp3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like they are afraid of losing customers.
Parent
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, seriously. Anything bought on iTunes should be ripped to Audio CD anyway for backup purposes. That strips the Fairplay DRM -- and can be re-imported into your music player of choice.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A store could never get away with sending you CD-Rs when you ordered DVD-Rs by just saying that its the basically the same thing, one product just has a little more space. So why can music-subscription companies?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually no (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you've never heard of lossless compression [wikipedia.org]?
Burn lossy file to CD. Re-rip and encode it in a lossless format. The resulting file will sound identical to the original.
Yaz.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At a significantly increased size compared with the original file. Or, you could avoid all this nonsense with QTFairUse [wikipedia.org] or hymn [wikipedia.org], no?
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I don't get it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Video and now this? That time has arrived, and the examples are trickling in. At least with Apple, you have rather a "blue chip" company backing your DRM, and one that's receptive enough to its customer base (and one with a large enough post-customer base) that it's unlikely they'd screw 'em all. Still, though, there's the possibility that they (or even the iTMS division) could suddenly tank someday down the road after some executive mishaps.
Personally, DRM jus
People Don't Buy Restricted Music. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [bbc.co.uk], 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.
Parent
Re:People Don't Buy Restricted Music. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
We are happy to be able to offer you a 1-month free subscription to the Virgin Media digital streaming jukebox and this link will be available from next week.
Streaming jukebox application with Trusted Computing technology anyone?
Higher Expectations (Score:4, Insightful)
Would such an argument even hold up in court?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Newsflash: Laws more powerful than EULAs! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So Joe Sixpack finally gets burned by DRM and realizes what we on Slashdot have been railing against all this time. Personally, I hope that there are more incidents with other music stores where the unsuspecting public gets burned by DRM. Perhaps then they will take the time to learn what DRM is and why it is a bad thing for them to be spending their money on. If enough average people get bitten by the DR
I'm dying to hear the real reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Sony did the Same (Score:2, Insightful)
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 dat
Re:Sony did the Same (Score:5, Informative)
That is, another proprietary format.
Parent
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Funny how it works (Score:3, Insightful)
Never seems to happen, though.
GemStar's eBook is a good example (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about writing to your Elected Representative -- citing this as an example -- and asking that this sort of thing be made law? If and when the DRM-infested media company go out of business, they must make some provision for customers who have purcha
Lawsuits brewing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Services vs. products (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the contrary... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Great example of a common argument against DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Why can't they just remove their DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the big yellow button (Score:3, Funny)
Either You're Free, Or you're Apple (Score:3, Informative)
*cough* (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Damn... (Score:3, Insightful)
------------------
Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to misread it.
People don't want subscriptions (Score:3, Insightful)
People also dislike differental pricing as it usually ends up being "differential" the wrong way.
Why not imitate success instead of failure? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's going to happen sooner or later - no OS install lasts forever.
If Apple crashed and burned, I'd just export the music I bought from iTunes to MP3 and then reimport it.
Errr? That's exactly what Virgin's suggesting their customers do.
For an old time geek, you're pretty gullible.
Do they really say rip to MP3? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Just another example (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Did Virgin even read their Terms & Conditions? (Score:4, Informative)
Near the top: [virgindigital.co.uk]
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.
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.
going out of business ? (Score:3, Informative)
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.