Virgin launches subscription-based music service
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On Monday, Virgin Group subsidiary Virgin Digital launched an online store designed to leverage the name recognition of its brick-and-mortar Virgin Megastore while competing with a subscription-based model.
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By MAY WONG    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- The consumer electronics arm of the Virgin Group is introducing a new 5-gigabyte hard-disk portable music player, bringing a powerful brand name in music to the increasingly crowded product space...
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NEW YORK (Billboard) - Music Choice and Sprint are  launching a music service that allows mobile phone users to  view short videoclips and listen to radio-like programming on  their handsets.
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$5/month Web-based service will deliver the songs without commercial interruption.
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British entrepreneur Richard Branson is aiming for a piece of the digital-music market, launching Virgin Digital in the US The online Megastore will offer music-download fans about one million songs from which to choose, at 99 cents each.
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Later this year, portable music subscription services will offer to fill your MP3 player with tunes for a monthly fee. Here's a preview of one of the first.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.K. startup hopes to compete withÂ Apple's new iPhone by offering a flat-rate music service that can run on most of today's mobile phones. Omnifone Ltd. launched on Thursday its MusicStation service that allows mobile phone users to download as many music tracks as they want for â¬2.99 (US$3.97) per week. The company previewed MusicStation in February at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. The Swedish mobile phone subsidiary of Norwegian telco Telenor ASA is the first to offer the MusicStation service. More than 30 operators in Europe, Asia and South Africa have signed up to offer the service. To use MusicStation, users must have handsets preinstalled with the application. "MusicStation runs on any Java and music-enabled device," said Omnifone spokesman Tim Hadley. "We're talking about 75 percent of the phones currently available on the market." The company plans to have more than 100 million MusicStation-enabled handsets within the next 12 months. Omnifone has developed software that allows its application to be ported to the many different types of Java used on mobile phones, according to Hadley. One of the main benefits of MusicStation is quick and easy navigating and downloading -- unlike many of the carrier music portals, based on WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) technology, which can be time-consuming and difficult to browse, according to the spokesman. "The application is very comparable to an MP3 player user experience," he said. Downloads to mobile phones over 3G (third-generation) mobile phone networks can take between 30 seconds and one minute, all of which can happen in the background. The service also runs on GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) networks. Omnifone has signed licensing deal with several large music companies, including EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music International. "We're starting with over 1 million tracks," Hadley said. DRM (digital rights management) technology protects all of the music. The mobile MusicStation service includes several features, such as messaging and the ability to share playlists and tracks. Over the next few months, the company plans to offer a MusicStation desktop application. For an additional â¬1 per month, customers can have all of the tracks downloaded to their mobile phones automatically download to their PCs when they log on to the portal service, according to Hadley. Operators, music companies and Omnifone will split revenue generated by MusicStation. Apple announced this week that iPhone users will need an account for its iTunes Store music service before activating the device. The iPhone debuts in the U.S. on June 29. Â
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The streaming site offers free tunes from major and indie labels.
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New York, September 28: British tycoon Richard Branson&#39;s Virgin Group has said it was jumping into the market for online music, with a &quot;digital megastore&quot; offering US customers song downloads for 99 cents.
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Paid music and movie download service launches today.
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RICHARD Branson&#39;s Virgin Group said today it was jumping into the market for online music, with a &quot;Digital Megastore&quot; offering US customers song downloads for 99 US cents ($1.
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Richard Branson's Virgin Group said it was jumping into online music, with a &quot;Digital Megastore&quot; for US customers offering song downloads for 99 cents.
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Online music service Napster teams up with Virgin Radio to launch a music download chart.
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(InfoWorld) - Virgin Group Ltd. will shut down its online music subscription and download service in the U.S. and U.K. next month, leaving one less competitor for Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. In the U.K., Virgin Digital stopped selling tracks last Friday, and is no longer accepting new customers. As of Friday, only existing customers will be able to access the service, and the site will shut down for good on Oct. 19. The U.K. version of the site said users with more than one month of outstanding subscriptions will get a refund, but unused credits for song downloads should be used and won't be refunded. U.S. users of Virgin Digital will be able to use their credit on Napster LLC's music download service. The pending demise of Virgin Digital marks another casualty among online music stores, which have generally received lukewarm reception from consumers with the exception of Apple's market-leading iTunes service. Since Virgin Digital used digital rights management (DRM) technology from Microsoft Corp. to manage how songs could be played and transferred to portable devices, the service was not compatible with Apple's iPod line, which uses different DRM technology and file format. The Virgin Digital service allows customers to download tracks up to four more times to replace lost or damaged copies. Since that option will no longer be available when the store closes, the company advised customers who purchased tracks to back them up by burning the songs to a CD . Burning the tracks will let those customers re-import the tracks to the computer as MP3 files. Virgin also offered a subscription service that let people access an entire catalog of songs as long as they continued to pay the monthly fees. Those songs, which used Microsoft's DRM, would be unplayable if the person's subscription expired. Once the club closes, subscribers will also lose access to those songs. As part of the terms of subscription service, users were not allowed to burn those songs to CD. Virgin Digital officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the service's closure. The Virgin Digital store is not the only one to fold in the face of competition from Apple's iTunes -- or from illegal downloads. Last month, MTV Networks, which is owned by Viacom Inc., said it would merge its Urge music service with RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody service. Urge, which was a partnership between MTV and Microsoft launched in May 2006 that failed to effectively compete with iTunes. Â
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The Napster To Go portable digital music subscription service, which was previewed in September, works via a plug-in to Windows Media Player 10.
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p2pnet.net News:- Virgin Electronics has joined the mp3 race with a $250, five gig player which also handles Microsoft&#39;s WMA format.
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The consumer electronics arm of the Virgin Group is introducing a new five-gigabyte hard-disk portable music player, bringing a powerful brand name in music to the increasingly crowded product space.