Virgin & Universal Team For DRM Free Unlimited Music Downloads Comments

Curious - was anything mentioned on what proportion of the Universal catalog will be made available, and what minimum subscription period will Virgin Media impose?

There are some worrying things about the information you discovered dear writer.. If they're looking at £15-20/month with only one music label, what will happen when more come on board?

Will they count the content downloaded via this service as part of their fair usage/throttling allowance?

Sigh.

Things like this make me so angry, and it's depressing to see a whole industry go in completely the wrong direction for so long (although they're not the only ones that seem to be confounded by this whole 'Internet' thing).

The formula for the most successful online music service imaginable has been sitting there for so long and still no one will offer it to us (large variety of music in 320kbps MP3/AAC or (preferably) FLAC format, DRM free, no other restrictions or limitations, at a reasonable(!) price (no, not giving me a physical copy, album artwork etc. etc. doesn't mean you can charge me more for it!)).

It's just such an obvious solution that the market is crying out for, yet everyone is too busy in their executive boardrooms lining their own pockets to go and put it out there. If they don't give people what they want and make it easy for them to get it then they only have themselves to blame, not the pirates, for poor sales.

So in the end, it's close but not close enough Virgin. You're still not getting my money, but thanks for playing. Now go and make it better and we'll talk.

Sorry for the (slightly misdirected) rant, but I feel better now. Carry on.

I will still continue to buy CD's until someone allows the download of CD (or near CD) quality sound in a lossless format. I understand I'm in the minority, but I am fairly certain their is a market for it.

This definitely sounds like a step in the right direction if they manage to get all the major labels on side. If not I can see it only having limited appeal.

Hopefully, if it proves successful, they'll introduce tiered packages with the amount you can download depending on the package. I only buy less then £10 worth of music from iTunes/Amazon every month, so paying £15-20 - even for unlimited downloading - doesn't make much sense to me. Only if the quality was that much better, (320kps or lossless as suggested) would it be worth the subscription fee.

Also, nice picture. At first I thought it was a Flight of the Conchords pic, as Branson looks so much like Jermaine in it :)

£20 for unlimited access to, for arguments sake, a catalogue the size of the iTunes library? Seems perfectly fair to me providing they do actually make it DRM free and transferable to whatever devices / formats I want. But I can see a slight problem here... Surely everyone's going to sign up for the minimum duration, suck EVERYTHING they want from the back catalogue as quickly as possible and then cancel. Not entirely sure how you get around that if it's an unlimited service.

@Gordon re: Flight of the Conchords....no, you aren't the only one!

@ Gordon - Uh, I'm not a Virgin Media broadband subscriber ;)

If they can really offer AAC 320kbps DRM free catalogue for £250 a year - I will give it some serious consideration. What I think is interesting is that Virgin Media are trying to expand into other services rather than the traditional role of an ISP. ISPs have been kicking up a fuss about content providers for a while now (e.g. BT vs iPlayer). A key point being that the service is only being offered bb subscribers. If this a sign of things to come things could get very interesting.

@Gordon - the press release doesn't say it's for Virgin *cable* broadband, just Virgin broadband. So I would say expect it to be accessable via Virgin ADSL from the start.

The big question would be is can you get it via mobile broadband or not?