Virgin Digital To Close Up Shop 207
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.
Why can't they just remove their DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gotta love "eCommerce". (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'm dying to hear the real reason... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:3, Interesting)
Saying that maybe this will be the generation that say "no more".
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.
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.
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.
Re:Re-import to Mp3? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Funny how it works (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why not imitate success instead of failure? (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.
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:Funny how it works (Score:3, Interesting)