Seasoned readers may remember my brief love affair with the Virgin Digital music download service, a love affair that ended when any semblence of working service disappeared for 3 weeks, then shortly after returning the entire system was ‘redesigned’ and stopped working entirely, then the bitch changed all the locks on the house and stepped on my blue suede shoes (OK, I made those last 2 bits up). Later in the year Virgin merged with serial fraudsters ntl, and I made resolute my decision to never give Virgin another penny.
With that in mind, imagine my glee when I got the following email today.
Subject: Important Information from Virgin Digital
From: “Virgin Digital”
Dear James,
We regret to announce that the Virgin Digital service is due to close.
We will no longer be taking customers from today, Friday 21st September.
On Friday the 28th September we will cease selling tracks and access will
be for current Club users only.
If you have purchased tracks from the service then we recommend that you
back up your music files. More information on how to back up and redownload
tracks is available on the below link:
http://www.virgindigital.co.uk/musicstore/help/buyingmusic/usingmystuff/
If you are a current Club member you will be able to continue using the
service until the date that your next payment is due, after which the service
will no longer be accessible to you.
To all our customers we would like to say thank you and offer our apologies
for any inconvenience this might cause.
We are happy to be able to offer you a one month free subscription to the
Virgin Media digital steaming jukebox, more information on this offer will be
available from next week at http://virgindigital.co.uk
Imagine now my complete lack of sympathy or surprise at this.
I’m sure some commentators will jump on this is ‘proving’ that subscription music services are simply not a viable business option. Let’s be clear; Virgin failed because they screwed the entire thing up. They had a working system which had some minor flaws, but instead of fixing the problems they relaunched an entirely different service which failed spectacularly and likely lost them most of their customers as a result. It’s difficult to recover from something like that. The only thing that baffles me is how they survived this long.
I remain convinced that music subscriptions are the way to go, all that has to happen is someone needs to sell it properly and have a system that works. It’s purely perception; many people baulk at the suggestion of not ‘owning’ their music (when in reality they don’t own it at all), yet they won’t bat an eyelid at paying £20 a month to rent television shows in the form of a cable or satellite subscription. The failure of any of the music subscription services to hit the mainstream is partly technical, as we’ve seen with Virgin, but it’s also a massive failure of marketing. As much as I hate to say it, I think if there is one company with the marketing muscle to pull it off, it’s Apple. If iTunes started such a service, it would be a success. I’m continually baffled as to what it is they think they have to lose by not doing so.
