Extremely Lame

As Rock Band has been out for some time, Harmonix is finally starting to release their first complete albums as downloadable content, starting with Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance, then eventually The Cars by The Cars, Doolittle by The Pixies, and the coup de grâce for me, Who’s Next by The Who. At $15 bucks a pop, if you buy all four albums, you’ve paid the price of an entire other video game, and while I’m not making light of the difficulty of translating multi-track recordings into 4 Rock Band tracks, that’s got to be a lot less work than creating an entirely new game, like with the Guitar Hero franchise. Brilliant from a business standpoint, but I’m not sure I’m getting my money’s worth.

Sure, $15 bucks for an album ain’t bad, but you’re paying $15 for an album that’s not only tied to one piece of hardware, but you’re paying $15 for an album that can only be enjoyed by using one piece of software on that one piece of hardware. That’s a bit unreasonable in my eyes; it’s worse than normal DRM. Sure, I’ll probably still drop the cash down when Who’s Next is released because I’m a consumer whore (and how!), but wouldn’t it be nice to have a copy of the mp3 that you could listen to on any device as well? Hell, even a wma file given that it’s a Microsoft product that I’m playing it on. It’d be annoying, but I could always burn that wma to a CD and then rip it back to an mp3.