On Friday, the Virgin Entertainment Group announced that it will close two Megastore locations and open a new "specialty" store near the Hollywood Bowl next month. Stores in Chicago and Salt Lake City will be boarded up due to high rent costs and declining profits.

CEO Simon Wright wrote suppliers that the company has no plans to close any more locations, other than the Sunset Boulevard store in January 2008 (a lease termination), and the company is interested in new locations opening in New York and California . The group closed a number of locations last year, including the Dallas Mockingbird Station location which was closed due to high rent and a lease termination.

Record stores like the Virgin Megastore chain are one of the slowly fading markets for music as digital sales increase. Last year, California-based Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and closed the entire chain throughout the country. Tower currently exists only in international markets and as an online store, though plans are in the works to open new stores in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Virgin's stores offer similar products to Tower, but are bigger than the latter and offer more than just music, which should give them greater staying power.

The continued closings are a sign of things that are simply being forestalled across the board, while the promise of new stores may be nothing to believe in. As big and expansive as these stores are, the digital growth slowly deletes the need for their existence.