Virgin Digital, the digital arm of Virgin, is launching its online music service…it is a subscription service, much like RNWK’s Rhapsody, and Napster (its sub service): $7.99 monthly fee (a dollar cheaper than AOL, Rhapsody and others) for unlimited listening online. It also has 99 cent downloads….

A “portable subscription” service with MSFT’s Janus DRM—which will allow those tracks to be moved to a portable music player—will be introduced soon, at a slightly higher price.

Interesting this: And in the next few months, several other subscription services will be introduced at prices as low as $5 a month, said Ellie Hirschhorn, COO of MusicNet.

Also: on portable subscriptions, even though Napster introduced it as a trial at $14.95 a month, Napster’s CEO Chris Gorog said the record industry was pushing to have the final price closer to $20 a month.

Related:

—Napster To Launch Portable Subscription Service; Pricing $14.95 a Month