Digital Home Thoughts: Virgin Launching Online Music Store

Apple will soon have more competition on its hands. In August, Virgin Entertainment plans to launch it's own self branded online music download service to compete against Apple's popular iTunes Music Store. The service, called Virgin Digital, is built in partnership with MusicMatch, and based on Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. Pricing has not yet been disclosed, but the really interesting aspect to this service is that it supports many different types of devices beyond just MP3 players, such as Cell phones and Handhelds.

It will be interesting to see how well this service is designed, but if it is based on MusicMatch software, I doubt it will be as elegant as iTunes.