We weren't aware that Virgin's branding had extended from
soda and
makeup to digital music stores, but
Hypebot let us know that the US outlet of Virgin Digital has been shuttered. All existing subscribers will be shuttled over to Napster—which, like Virgin, protects its music files with PlaysForSure, the DRM standard for Windows Media files until Microsoft kicked it to the curb for the file-protection scheme it uses with the
Zune. This postpones the Napster deathwatch for at least another few weeks; we're starting to wonder if Microsoft's abandonment of the PlaysForSure standard may be the best thing to happen to the company. As more companies head for the digital-music exit (we're looking at you,
FYE) and pawn their subscribers off on the former MP3 outlaws, they can then breathe a sigh of relief and fire off another
"Go, Team!" press release.
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Idolator
Google has made the 2001 version of its search index available to celebrate its 10th birthday (it's the oldest version the site had available—see, people, everyone needs to remember to back up their hard drives now and again!), and I figured it would be fun to plug in a few music-related terms and see what pages came up as the top results, and whether or not those pages were housed in the Internet archive known as the Wayback Machine. The results after the jump.
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"We've been dour about the music business in general and Napster in particular, so we feel obliged to point out that the company has done something right: It offers a nice, free, streaming music service, with few strings attached. It doesn't require registration, has an extensive catalog, and while it was supposed to be ad-supported, there's barely any advertising there. Which is why the company has orphaned the service and hidden it from casual visitors. Check it out before it disappears." [
