Virgin has announced a deal with record label Universal that will provide unlimited access to the company’s music catalogue for a fixed monthly fee. The level of this fee is as yet unnanounced but is reckoned to be the equivalent to the cost of two albums. The service will be available by Christmas 09.
The biggest aspect of this news is that Virgin has also undertaken to attempt to tackle the problem of online music piracy with the ulitmate disconnection a potential penalty for persistent offenders. This appears to be a big step forward and is likely timed in advance of the Digital Britain report, delayed now until later this week.
This deal is likely to bring pressure to bear on other large consumer ISPs. It does remain to be seen how the removal of broadband service from persistent pirates (to put it poetically) is handled. This has been the one aspect of the debate that has had ISPs up in arms. They don’t want to be seen to be doing the police’s job.
The Virgin paid for model is of course different to the We7 advertising funded service discussed last week. The whole area is of a great deal of interest to many people. My We7 posts get more hits than any other published item on this blog. Helped no doubt by the fact that I have been giving away free We7 promotional codes :-).
If you want one let me know. I got a fresh batch in recently.