*No newspapers, no music stores.
*How long do you expect your iTunes store to last?
http://www.salon.com/news/brand_graveyard/?last_story=/news/brand_graveyard/feature/2009/03/12/virgin/
(...)
Virgin mogul Richard Branson, now one of the most famous entrepreneurs (and richest men) in the world, had begun his career selling records out of the trunk of his car. That led to a mail order record company specializing in European imports of cosmic rock and progressive music. When a postal strike screwed with his mail-order business, Branson opened his first Virgin outlet in 1971 – a groovy record store in Notting Hill Gate, then London's equivalent to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Customers would hang out in the store all day, smoking joints while plopped on beanbags. Propelled by the fingers-in-too-many-pies ambition that would be the hallmark of his entire career, Branson also started a fashion company (called Virgin Rags) and a health-food store around the same time. Neither did as well as the record store or his next big venture, a music label that supported a roster of audaciously non-commercial music from its birth in 1973 right through to punk (Branson famously signed the Sex Pistols after they'd been kicked off two other labels).
The Notting Hill store begat the first megastore, which launched on Oxford Street, London's most bustling shopping boulevard, in 1979. Over the next decade and a half, Virgin would export the megastore concept all around the world, including the U.S. At its peak in 2002, the U.S. chain counted 23 stores and $230 million in sales. Those American spots generally offered the same kind of range as the Oxford Street store I visited all those years ago (even if they seemed a little less glamorous here on familiar ground, where the boys wore a lot less eyeliner). But it did have a rival, in the form of Tower Records, another store that made the record fiend feel giddy at the sheer scale and range of its stock, and also wore its alternative cred on its sleeves.
Tower went bankrupt in 2006. But Virgin Megastores in the U.S. is being dissolved because its current owners – not Branson, who long ago sold off his retail chain, but a joint venture of real estate companies that bought the chain in 2007 – believe they can make a lot more money from the property that the Megastores occupy than from CD sales. (The British chain of megastores is also shutting down, though stores in places like Australia and Japan survive.) In other words, the new U.S. owners are betting on something, anything, other than music....
