VirginMega.fr

» see virginmega.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

VirginMega.fr opened in May 2004, a few weeks before Apple brought the iTunes Store to France. For those weeks it was the legal download store in the country, run by the same company that ran the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Élysées, and it should have been the incumbent's moment.

It launched without a single track from any of the five majors. The negotiations had not closed, so the catalog at open was independent labels only, which was somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the French record market. A store selling a fifth of the music, four weeks before Apple arrived selling all of it. The majors did come in eventually and the catalog passed 300,000 tracks, but the first impression had already been made and Apple had made the other one.

The numbers never recovered. GfK's 2011 figures put VirginMega fifth in French online music with 3.6 percent, behind Amazon at 4.2 and Fnac Music at 3.8, with Apple sitting on 70.2 percent of the market. Being fifth in your own country in a business you entered first is a hard position to explain to a board.

~ the record ~

~ the parent went first ~

Virgin Megastore France collapsed under the same pressure that killed record shops everywhere, and the download store went down with it on paper before it went down in the market. VirginMega.fr was placed in judicial reorganization on 30 May 2013. On 4 July 2013 the Paris commercial court handed it to Digital Virgo, and for another year and a half it kept selling MP3s under a brand whose physical stores had already been cleared out.

~ the last november ~

In November 2014 customers got an email saying the store would cease trading. The formal date was 31 December 2014. The archive's last full capture of the front page is 3 November, a little over twenty kilobytes of catalog, and the next capture in the sequence is a redirect on 18 December. From 2015 the domain answered with server errors until it stopped answering at all.

~ why none of this reached me ~

Legal download stores in that decade were licensed country by country, and Turkey was not one of the countries. The catalog stopped at a border I was on the wrong side of, and the payment methods stopped there too. By the time any of it opened up, the whole model had been replaced by subscriptions. VirginMega was an argument between Virgin and Apple over the French chart, held in French.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »