Virgin Digital was an

online music store A digital music store is a business that sells digital audio files of music recordings over the Internet. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a music streaming service, where they listen to recordings without ...

operated in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

and

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

by the

Virgin Group Virgin Group Ltd. is a British multinational venture capital conglomerate founded by Richard Branson and Nik Powell in February 1970. Virgin Group's date of incorporation is listed as 1989 by the Companies House, who class it as a holding c ...

. It launched on 2 September 2005 in the UK, and was refreshed in November 2006 to run through an

internet browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

, rather than the former Virgin Digital Player. The site closed down in late 2006 in the US, while the UK store closed in October 2007. Virgin Digital offered individual tracks at £0.79 and most albums for about £6.49. Its subscription service, Digital Music Club, cost £9.99 per month. It had the singular distinction of being among the largest collected online music library, with over two and a half million downloadable tracks. Purchased tracks could be transferred to other devices and burned to CDs. Subscription tracks were tethered to the PC (up to 3) and could be transferred to a portable music player, although this required the premium subscription service, at £14.99 per month. Song previews were 30 seconds in the Music Store, although full length tracks were available to subscribers. A chat function was considered to let subscribers communicate while browsing, downloading or listening to tracks.

Closure

Virgin Digital originally operated in both the

and

. The US store was discontinued in late 2006, and this website now redirects to

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn ...

. On Friday 21 September 2007, an announcement appeared on the Virgin Digital UK website stating the following: "Dear customer, we regret to announce that the Virgin Digital service is due to close. We will be taking no new customers from today, Friday 21 September." The UK store finally closed on Friday 19 October 2007. Virgin have stated on their website that the decision to close Virgin Digital was so that the company could concentrate on offering digital media through

Virgin Media Virgin Media is a British telecommunications company which provides telephone, Cable television, television and Internet access, internet services in the United Kingdom. Its headquarters are at Green Park in Reading, Berkshire, Reading, Engla ...

, which has its own music store operated by

OD2 On Demand Distribution (OD2) was one of the first online music download services, which existed from 1999 until 2009. History On Demand Distribution, short O-D2 or OD2, was founded by English musician Peter Gabriel, Real World, Real World CEO ...

References

External links

Virgin Media
Defunct websites Digital Defunct online music stores Defunct digital music services or companies {{UK-retail-company-stub