HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Yet another player in the subscription-based music services arena.

Virgin Group launched Virgin Digital Red Pass today [via]. The service is available to US and UK residents, and it’s Windows 2000 & XP only. For an impressively low $7.99/month you get access to more than 2M tracks and 60 professionally programmed Internet radio stations. Songs are in protected WMA format and you can transfer them to your MP3 player as long as it’s (1) not an iPod, (2) carries that “Plays For Sure” logo (supports Windows Media DRM 10).

Don’t know what to choose? The service’s software will be coming with a feature meant to make your music exploration easier: a button that auto-fills your library with personalized selections.

You’ll be able to burn CDs with tracks you buy from the service for $.99—that’s to say, you can’t burn a CD with tracks you got from your subscription plan.

Should your subscription lapse, the music you’ve downloaded stays there (though it’s useless to you since you can’t reproduce it)—your playback rights are granted back to you when you reactivate your account. That is supposed to be a feature, because your downloads could have been automatically deleted when the subscription lapsed, and then you’d have to re-download them if you needed them again. Okay.

Finally, according to the Reuters article:

[...] all purchased tracks will be replaced free should a user’s computer crash or be lost or stolen within a year.

OK, I appreciate the gesture, I really do. (For example, the iTMS doesn’t do this though it should—although there are reports that if you email them and have a heartening enough story, they’ll allow you to get your music purchases back for free.) But why implement this feature in a such a silly way? Within a year? Why, what’ll happen if I ask for my lost download two years after I bought it? Your bandwidth bills will go out of hand? It’s a digital copy for crying out loud. Bits and bytes. I’m a legitimate owner, allow me to reclaim my download whenever I want.

UPDATE: Whee! Turns out you can only activate your tracks up to 5 times—considering that you activate them once, when you buy them, if your computer crashes/you buy a new one/switch with your kid make sure that the total of those incidents remains under the deadly number FOUR. DRM is evil enough all by itself, it doesn’t need the help of stupid marketers.