Introduction
By the mid-90s the sales of individual singles, be it in the cassette or CD format, were slumping to the point that caused concern for music labels. Fast forward to around 1999 and the rise of "peer-to-peer" file trading websites like Napster forced the music industry to confront something they rarely had to deal with in the past (in the USA at least): Piracy of recorded works. It was then the labels joined together and took down the Napster and forced people to find other networks to "share" their songs with others. While that happened, the labels took control of what was left of Napster and turned it into a viable and legal place to buy tracks to download on to your computer. Since most people don't like monopolies of any kind (unless they're playing the board game), the time was ripe for competitors to climb to the front. Among the competitors there is a rather new entrant into the fold, Virgin Digital.
Virgin Digital is an offshoot of the high profile brick-and-mortar Virgin Megastore with both being a part of the huge Virgin Company Richard Branson founded and still runs. Mr. Branson likes to venture into new territories of work (as evidence by his foray into commercial space flights) and Virgin Digital is a natural progression for the company. Also new and uncharted territory for the digital world is the marketing of digital download product to the country music audience, an audience that never really was courted by any of the "leading" download sites except for perhaps the Wal-Mart.com download service. Being the smart and astute business that Virgin is, look for them to be successful at becoming the leader of music downloads for country music fans.
The Service
Like every other service, Virgin Digital gets all of the new songs that one can download, like new singles from various artists such as Buddy Jewell, newcomers Ryan Shupe And The Rubberband and the big stars like Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith and Trisha Yearwood. Also the Virgin Digital music store is easy to navigate and, this is the very cool part, it allows you to listen to any song all the way through once to see if you like the complete song. And the kicker of it all is it's free to do this. Of course you'll still have to buy the track if you want to listen to the complete song again but unlike other services that force you to sign up for streaming service, Virgin Digital doesn't require that. Then again, if you like that option, Virgin does offer a "Digital Music Club" which, for $7.99 a month, offers unlimited streaming and downloading to your computer, so if you attach great speakers to it, you can have your computer turn into a jukebox. That's a pretty cool option.
Of course, the main reason people will come to Virgin Digital is to download their songs to use in a MP3 player and by purchasing the song, you can do that or burn it onto a CD to play on any stereo you own, be it the Hi-Fi system in the family room or your car's stereo. Also an advantage to downloading the tracks is that you can avoid credit card or debit charges of 99 cents per song by buying a bulk amount of downloads that's available in various values, like $10, $15, $20, $50 and so on. While you're not required by Virgin Digital to buy "blocks" of songs, I prefer to download songs this way to avoid the funky, and long, credit card statements. Also, you can buy most standard albums for $9.99 per album, which his usually a three to four dollar discount compared to physical CDs bought in the store.
