London - Richard Branson's Virgin Group has announced that it will shutter its Virgin Digital online music service.

The company stopped accepting new customers on Friday, and is set to close for all customers on Oct. 19.

Virgin Digital offered a subscription service featuring songs encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which came with digital rights management (DRM) and could not be played on Apple's iPod.

The company did not provide an explicit reason for the store's closing, although competition from Apple's iTunes Store and a growing number of DRM-free music stores like Amazon MP3 likely played a role.

Virgin Group also recently sold off its 30-year-old entertainment retail unit Virgin Megastores; at the time, chairman Richard Branson noted: "In the last six years we have been withdrawing from entertainment retailing which is no longer viewed as core to the Group's future."

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