Virgin Music

The music industry has been desperate to boost digital sales in recent years to overcome online piracy. And this pioneer to do so is the British cable TV operator Virgin Media, which through a partnership with the world’s largest music company Universal, is to launch an unlimited music download subscription service. The service, which both sides described as a world first, would allow the Virgin Media broadband customers to both listen by streaming and download to keep as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal catalogue.

Credit: mirror.co.uk

Virgin Media said that the core reason behind the partnership with the music company is to prevent piracy on its system by educating users and would, as a last resort for persistent offenders, suspend Internet access. An also that this such a time in the United Kingdom that the pirate music is still flourishing and the government is looking to for the possible solution to tackle with this problem. The idea behind this is to make available the music to the public at affordable rates so that they could be lured back from pirate sites.

The music will be in the MP3 format, meaning that it can be played on the vast majority of music devices, including the iPod, and mobile phones; obviously with no protection and can be copied freely. The downloaded music will be the customers to save and enjoy the music for as long as they want.

The download rate will be good quality and the anticipated download speed could go up to 256kbps.

According to Virgin Media, no customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on the network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin. This means that the Universal will monitor the customer traffic in the same way as BPI does not that it will alert Virgin Media if one of its files is being shared. As far as the punishment of the offenders is concerned; Virgin Media has already announced that no one will be permanently disconnected but a temporary suspension may be done.

An other issue regarding this deal is that the Virgin Media has announced that they are negotiating with the other UK major and independent music labels and publishers to ensure it can offer a complete, compelling catalogue by the time it launches—-but it could result as a drawback to the service as this it not confirm yet and the other partners may never come.

Similarly, Virgin Media has yet to give out the pricing details, but the anticipated price rate is just as same as to that of two albums. But for the customers who don’t want to download unlimitedly they can download on the regular basis under the “Entry Level” offer.

A major advantage of the Virgin Music Deal is that it is different from the Spotify who is currently boasting a lot of more music but the fact still remains that, it is a streaming service which means that you can’t freely download and share it to other devices.

Last but not the least this service will be available to all Virgin Media broadband subscribers only.

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