A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a co-worker, Adam Lasnik, about the online music industry. Other than being an all around nice guy, it turns out that Adam knows quite a bit about all the online music sites. At his suggestion, I tried out Virgin Digital, the new online Music store and service by Mr. Branson.
Essentially, the deal goes like this: you pay a monthly fee, and you get to listen to all the music in their library via their application. The fee is like $9 – $10 a month. As soon as you stop paying the fee, the music stops.
They had a 14 day free trial, so… I tried it.
My overall impression was Wow. Although their app had a few kinks or UI quirks, it was an amazing experience to literally listen to just about anything you could think of. They, of course, did not have some of the odd stuff that I listened to during my college years, but they pretty much had everything else. I could easily see myself paying $10 a month to listen to whatever I want. The service also did allow you to download WMA files of the songs, so you could listen to it that way as well. I never felt the need to. My wife loved it too, and she agreed.
Virgin Digital is highly recommended.
Now, with Napster on the Microsoft Media Center and with cell phone networks getting better. You can imagine something like this being really handy. One other blog I read, Russell Beattie’s notebook, already talked about the potential on cell phones. In fact, a few days after he suggested it, I read about ATT Wireless selling music on cell phones.