Virgin Digital

» see virgindigital.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

by the time virgin digital launched in september '05 i was already downloading albums the old way. really though, in ankara on ttnet in the mid-2000s the default was allofmp3 for anyone with a credit card and turkish forum sites for everyone else. wma files with drm at 79p each was not a proposition anyone i knew was reaching for. the drm sat between you and the file, meaning your music was tied to whichever windows media player install you had authorized.

virgin digital was richard branson's late entrant to the digital music retail category, launched 2 september 2005 in the uk and us as an itunes competitor. the pitch was that virgin group already had the megastore retail brand and could translate the record-shop-per-city model to a download store. tracks were priced at 79p each in the uk with albums around six pounds fifty. the catalog reached 2.5 million tracks at peak.

the format was windows media audio with playsforsure drm, which meant the files worked on windows media player and on the small number of portable devices microsoft had licensed the drm to. not on ipods. that alone put a ceiling on the addressable market from day one, ipod was already the dominant player and playsforsure devices were a rounding error next to it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

virgin digital ran two products in parallel. the download store sold individual tracks and albums as one-off purchases. the digital music club was a subscription tier at £9.99 a month that let you stream and download tracks tethered to the subscription, with a premium tier at £14.99 that added portable-device sync.

the subscription model matched the shape of napster's paid tier and of microsoft's urge product line, both of which sat on top of playsforsure drm and windows media. the pool of compatible devices was the same shrinking pool. really though, once apple's itunes plus started dropping drm on select tracks in 2007, the entire wma-drm music retail category lost its remaining argument.

~ the slide ~

the us site closed first. reports vary but by late 2006 the virgindigital.com storefront was pointing to virginmega, the us branch stopped taking new subscriptions and quietly wound the site down through winter '06 and into '07. the operation was too small to keep separate infrastructure running in two markets. really though, uk stayed open through most of 2007 while virgin group figured out what to do with the brand.

what killed it was consolidation, not competitive pressure directly. virgin media, the cable and broadband business, was building its own music store on top of the od2 platform. rather than run two virgin-branded music stores in the same country, more or less, group made the call in autumn 2007 to close virgin digital and route customers to virgin media's version.

~ what buried it ~

19 october 2007 was the last day of the uk service. subscribers were given a partial refund credit and pointed to the virgin media music store. what got buried was not just a brand. it was another one of the wma-drm music stores from the mid-2000s that all died within a couple of years of each other. the drm model was the thing dying, not any one store. microsoft urge had already closed in the same window, and msn music was being folded into the zune ecosystem.

virgin digital's replacement, the virgin media store, ran on od2 tech that was itself already being absorbed by nokia. that store did not last much longer. really though, virgin group eventually exited music retail entirely and settled for radio and record-label deals as the digital categories consolidated around itunes and later spotify.

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