Industry Moves: Virgin Adds Orange’s Wheeler As First Music Head

imageOrange’s music head Richard Wheeler is jumping over to the same role at Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED), which is trying to launch an innovative unlimited subscription music package to go with its ISP business.

This is a new role for Virgin. The company is losing its existing music store this month after Nokia (NYSE: NOK) OD2’s decision to wind down its white-label music e-tail ops, but Virgin had bigger plans anyway. Though it in January scrapped plans to use the vendor Playlouder MSP to create an innovative Virgin Music Unlimited plan that would effectively legalise music traffic between subscribers, CEO Neil Berkett is on record as wanting “to do something breakthrough” in the space and, in his submission to Lord Carter’s Digital Britain consultation, said he’s working on