Virgin Digital was an online music store

Online music store

An online music store is an online business which sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from music streaming services in that the music store offers the actual music file, while streaming services offer partial or full listening without...

 operated in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 by the Virgin Group

Virgin Group

Virgin Group Limited is a British branded venture capital conglomerate organisation founded by business tycoon Richard Branson. The core business areas are travel, entertainment and lifestyle. Virgin Group's date of incorporation is listed as 1989 by Companies House, who class it as a holding...

. It launched on 2 September 2005 in the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, and was refreshed in November 2006 to run through an internet browser, rather than the former Virgin Digital Player. The site closed down in late 2006 in the US, while the UK store closed in October 2007.

Virgin Digital offered individual tracks at £0.79 and most albums for about £6.49. Its subscription service, Digital Music Club, cost £9.99 per month. It had the singular distinction of being among the largest collected online music library, with over two and a half million downloadable tracks.

Purchased tracks could be transferred to other devices and burned to CDs. Subscription tracks were tethered to the PC (up to 3) and could be transferred to a portable music player, although this required the premium subscription service, at £14.99 per month. Song previews were 30 seconds in the Music Store, although full length tracks were available to subscribers.

A chat function was considered to let subscribers communicate while browsing, downloading or listening to tracks.

Closure

Virgin Digital originally operated in both the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The US store was discontinued in late 2006, and this website now redirects to Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

.

On Friday 21 September 2007, an announcement appeared on the Virgin Digital UK website stating the following:
The UK store finally closed on Friday 19 October 2007. Virgin have stated on their website that the decision to close Virgin Digital was so that the company could concentrate on offering digital media through Virgin Media

Virgin Media

Virgin Media Inc. is a company which provides fixed and mobile telephone, television and broadband internet services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom...

, which has its own music store operated by OD2

OD2

On Demand Distribution , one of the first online music download services, was co-founded by entrepreneur Charles Grimsdale and musician Peter Gabriel in 1999...

.