Askgar

This entry may sound out of place on for my blog but I’ll be talking about value of music compared to MMOs.

I’ve been a fan of Linkin Park for about 10 years now and although I’m much less of a fan than I used to be, I still wanted to get the album at release and wouldn’t buy it on iTunes, or any other digital music store, so popped down £9.49 for the cd in Sainsbury’s and off I went.

Initially I was impressed, it looked like the cd had 16 tracks and it was only when I looked on a computer I realised there were only 9 real tracks, the rest were just filler. Now the album itself was good but I feel somewhat cheated that it cost me almost £10 for 9 tracks, more than £1 for each “real” track.

This got me thinking, I paid the same price for this cd as I would for a month of an MMO and I felt instantly ripped off. When I pay for a month on an MMO that is a subscription for a month, after that time I either pay again, or I lose it. The cd on the other hand is mine, I don’t lose it after a month, and I can do what I want with it.

The closest musical comparison to an MMO subscription would be something like a Spotify premium subscription, it costs £10 a month and let’s you listen to unlimited music offline, and on a mobile, for that month, after the month it all disappears, like an MMO subscription does. Unfortunately for Spotify, at least in my case, I am quite happy to use their free service, it is unlimited music listened to online with adverts every 5 or 10 tracks. I don’t listen to enough music to care about the adverts so I don’t find them annoying.

Looking at this it is obvious that the best value comes from Spotify free, in a similar way to free to play MMOs. There are then 2 options, either the subscription route, possible with both f2p MMOs and Spotify, as well as other subscription only MMOs and the purchase route, such as buying a CD or buying a one off purchase game, these are mostly secure however if the service purchased from, if digital, disappears, then you lose the music, if not backed up, or the game completely.

Of all the routes, for my music I prefer buying a CD or just using Spotify free. Whereas for games I much prefer the purchase outright route, although I don’t mind digital there, I also like f2p MMOs where I can chose to unlock content permanently, instead of having to pay a subscription.