Bowing to the inevitable
Universal Music has taken the brave step of being the first major music publisher to offer its entire catalogue available for unlimited, DRM-free download in return for a monthly subscription.
The ground-breaking service will be made available to Virgin Media broadband customers in the UK before the end of this year.
While other music download subscription services, like Microsoft's Zune, offer unlimited streaming but put a cap on the number of tracks you can download and keep, this service claims to be truly unlimited.
Such a proposition is probably the only solution to illegal file-sharing. Only by making it affordable for people to accumulate the music they want legitimately can the music industry hope to lure them away from the peer-to-peer model.
We spoke to Virgin Media's head of consumer media relations Asam Ahmad to get further clarification. He confirmed that Virgin has no plans to cap the number of downloads, but that the service will require some kind of agreement not to indulge in file-sharing.
He stressed the details of the deal have yet to be finalised, but that persistent offenders could be subject to a suspension of their Internet access. The press release stressed: "No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media."
