Comments on: Want to Buy a CD in Times Square? Make It Quick: Virgin's Giving Up

By: Music Retail Going, Going, Just About Gone: Virgin Shutting Two More Music Stores | bouncefm.com

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:32:17 +0000

[...] people who run the Virgin Megastore chain have already announced plans to close their Times Square outpost, which is the highest-volume music store in the U.S. So news that they’re shuttering even more of [...]

By: JamesTrosh.com

JamesTrosh.com — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:36:34 +0000

[...] Comments » My photo of the Virgin Megastore sign on Times Square in New York was used in an article on the All Things Digital website, a part of The Wall Street [...]

By: Music Retail Going, Going, Just About Gone: Virgin Shutting Two More Music Stores | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:54:13 +0000

By: Peter Kafka

Peter Kafka — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:18:12 +0000

Hey Glenn. Virgin Megastore is no longer a Branson operation, right? Maybe that’s the reason they’re gone.
Anyway, yes people still buy billions of dollars worth of CDs. But I think that increasingly the only way to sell them via bricks and mortar is going to be via a handful of mom and pops doing it for kicks, and as impulse buys stacked next to the gum and iTunes cards at the checkout counter.

By: Glenn Peoples

Glenn Peoples — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:22:09 +0000

It’s partly about the health of music retail and partly about choosing how to generate revenue in a high rent district like Times Square. You ask why anybody even bothers to sell CDs. The answer is because there is still a market for them. There will still be CDs sold in the country, but retailers that specialize in music are not able to bear such high rent expense as Virgin would have faced under its new Times Square landlord.

Virgin is showy, and that’s how Richard Branson likes to do business. But the CD can no longer be sold out of showy storefronts. Those days are gone, those margins are gone, those levels of sales are gone.