Virgin to Allow Downloaded Music to be Burned to CD

from the gee,-this-sounds-familiar dept

Virgin Megastores is trying to do what has been tried a number of times and always fails: allowing folks to make custom CDs from a kiosk in their stores. The twist this time is the CDs are made from music downloaded from a number of different web sites. I'm not really sure how this will work out in the end, but I don't see how this changes the problems that companies used to have when they tried similar approaches on cassettes in the 80's: maintenance of the kiosks was a pain and very costly, only one person at a time can use a kiosk and often they would just stand there for a long period of time listening to stuff, but not actually buying anything, and finally the selection has to be really compelling.