Virgin Music Download Service - Benefits And Drawbacks

Virgin Media announced recently a brand new aspect to their internet service providing. Something that has never been done by an ISP before and it has caused controversy the world over. Virgin Media have signed a deal with Universal music offering users of their ISP service, for a monthly fee, the chance to download as much music as they like.

Everyone has an opinion on whether Virgin's music download service will work or why it won't. Below I discuss five reasons for and against it.

Five Reasons Against Virgin's New Music Download Service

#1 Have to Change ISP People are lazy and despite the best offers in the world some people still won't take advantage of them if they require effort. This new Virgin service requires that you are a customer of Virgin broadband. If you combine this with the fact they may well lose out on TV and phone calls it's not an easy decision to make.

#2 Times Are Hard If you didn't know that then there's no hope for you. Everyone is very short of money at the moment and if people can get music for free then would they really want to put forward the extra 15/month for a few songs from Virgins new music download service?

#3 Limited in Your Choice Universal are a seriously big record label but it is only one label. It's a fantastic idea but if they only get one record label it is doomed to fail. They need to get more labels on board.

#4 There are other services There are already very similar services that allow you to sign up, pay a month fee and download as much music as your hard-drive can handle. Do people use them? Well some but in the general no because they can download it for free.

#5 Guilt Free Downloading They are advertising one of their main points as it being a guilt free to enjoy unlimited music however there are already a whole host of services that offer you that. You can stream your music off YouTube, Spotify, Myspace, Last.fm, PureVolume and so many more.

Five Reasons For Virgin's New Music Download Service

#1 The Music Is Yours Forever Unlike Napster where you will have all sorts of problems finding compatible MP3 players and file types. With Virgin's music download service you get the files in gloriously simple MP3 format. You can put them straight on your iPod or MP3 player and they are completely yours forever.

#2 It's For The Family Ok, this won't be a selling point for everyone but the UK is full families. Parents do not want each of their kids to be sat in their rooms downloading who-knows what music from torrents, warez, p2p networks. They also don't want the kids to be racking up thousands of downloads on iTunes. Virgin solves this perfectly by allowing all the family unlimited downloads from a secure network at one monthly price.

#3 Times are changing Times are changing. ISP's are changing and have started informing copyright owners when their files are illegally downloaded. This means you may well receive a letter from them telling you that you have been caught out. This alone is enough to put some people off. The government is only going to get tougher on this, with piracy websites getting sued left right and canter in time you may not have an option.

#4 Guilt Free Downloading Believe it or not, not everyone who downloads music illegally wants to be. With the increase in stricter laws against piracy and the more competitive music solutions fewer and fewer people will be taking the risk. If people can pay a one off monthly fee to fore-go all the worry and know that you can legally and morally download as much music as you want then

#5 It's About The Future If Virgin can only manage to sign up Universal then this service will definitely fail. What's interesting is if Branson manages to get a whole host of other record labels on board. It will bring an entirely new aspect to Internet Service Providing. As Orange Wednesday's became a massive deciding factor on choosing a UK cell phone SIM Card, Virgins service may become the deciding factor for when choosing an ISP.