Now, I make no secret (among my friends, at least) of the fact that, for me, there's nothing that beats buying physical copies of albums, either by getting them from your local record shop (...which, for me, is about fifty miles away, so I use the word "local" about as loosely as some people wear their jeans) or buy having them arrive in the post. While most people would argue that I'm stuck in the past for refusing to accept downloads of albums are the future, I just find that having physical copies of albums is just better for me on a lot of levels. Firstly, your record collection cannot be wiped out if you (or some malicious bastard) delete your account on something like iTunes, which means that you overall have more control over your album collection than a purely download based system allows you to have. Secondly, I find that there's nothing quite like being able to sit down and read the liner notes to an album, as the amount of hard work that artists can put into them can ultimately give you an indication as to how much they actually care about the album: if they look like crap, chances are that's what the artist thought of it. Thirdly, physical copies don't have the problem of factors like battery life interrupting your album when it runs out: just put it in a CD player that's plugged in and it'll nearly always work fine! Fourthly, it's far easier to lend a CD to a friend than it is to lend a digital copy of something because, with a physical copy, you just need to put the CD in your bag or pocket and you're done! Those aren't the only reasons, but, overall, you can get the idea that a good way to annoy me is to refuse to do a physical release of an album just because there apparently isn't the demand for them: there certainly is, it's just that most people today have no patience and find the thought of waiting for something to arrive completely unbearable!
This isn't to say that I think digital copies of albums are all bad (in fact, I do recognise that some people just can't have a large number of physical albums sitting around the place, either because they're constantly on the move or they just don't have the space) and I do recognise that there are advantages to digital distribution, especially among smaller bands or from international companies who would have to charge you an arm and a leg (or, at least, a noticeably larger amount than a digital download of the CD would) just to get your physical copy to you. However, I just prefer the old fashioned way of doing things and, until I have no choice except to embrace the digital distribution method of doing things due to CDs completely dying off, I am going to remain stoutly in the corner of preferring to be able to actually hold what I own in my hands. Even with systems for stuff like games (like Steam and PSN), I will still prefer to have a physical release of whatever I own, because I just don't trust companies to keep these things constantly online. Sooner or later, things like Steam, iTunes and PSN will close down (usually along with the company that made them) and then you will almost certainly be unable to access anything you didn't already have saved onto your computer. And maybe even then, if you're really unlucky. Call me paranoid, call me a grumpy sod, call me reluctant to embrace change, call me cynical, call me Shirley (...OK, maybe not the last one!), but, in ANY situation where something is only kept online because it's run by a company, I feel that being the one guy refusing to join the new age because I don't want to be too attached to something that could disappear very easily when the company's money does is a far more sensible idea than it looks like on first glance.
So, why am I talking about PledgeMusic? Well, two reasons: one, I feel that I have something that I wish to look at which is actually worth examining closely, in light of a few things which Jimquisition has rambled on about in the past for things like Kickstarter and Early Access games, and two, I want to rewrite a review that I was going to put up today and I couldn't find anything else to review to fill the void where the review should have been.
...Well, can't say I'm not honest!
Anyway, to bring the discussion to Early Access games and Kickstarter (trust me, there is a point to this), a trend that has become fairly popular in recent times in gaming is to ask people to help fund development of games. Kickstarter projects aren't actually exclusively linked towards gaming, as it's been used to fund things like movies in the past, but the basic point of Kickstarter is that you donate money to a project that you like the look of, with the expectation of getting something back from the person making the project in exchange. This can cover anything from merely getting a copy of the project itself when it is finished to getting to meet and work with the people making the project to help it reach completion. This is how some highly regarded games like Shovel Knight and Broken Age were funded, and many of them on nostalgia for types of games which most people don't make today (in those two examples, 8-bit platformers and point-and-click adventure games)...and it's also how Anita Sarkeesian was able to fund her web series, interestingly enough. Food for thought, I guess...
Now, on paper, Kickstarter is a very good idea, but, in practice, it is open to being exploited for personal gain. For a start, the project don't even need to have STARTED to be anything vaguely resembling developed before a Kickstarter can be opened for it: someone could feasibly open a Kickstarter project based purely on an idea they've had which they might end up scrapping purely because they aren't interested in doing it. Secondly, you have no guarantee that what you've put money down on is actually going to be good: much like when you pre-order something, you're putting down money for something that you cannot be sure of the final quality of, but, unlike pre-orders, you cannot cancel your order or get your money back if advance reviews of the final product indicate that it is a terribly made piece of crap which isn't worth buying: you paid for the product to be made and you have nobody to blame except yourself if your faith turns out to be misguided. Thirdly, there is no guarantee that your money will actually go towards funding the project you provided the money for: the person making the project could very well end up using the money for things not related to the project, if they even use the money on the project at all! Kickstarter is a VERY risky idea in practice, and there have, indeed, been tales in the past of people abusing the system, but it is certainly a noble idea on paper that I would support if I weren't a naturally suspicious sort.
Early Access runs on a similar idea to Kickstarter, except that you can at least claim to have something resembling a product guaranteed to be there when you buy it. With Early Access, you buy a game that you know is incomplete, which SHOULD help to fund further development of the game, and provide feedback on the game to help developers know what to put in the game, what to change, bugs that you've found and stuff like that. In essence, one could argue that buying an Early Access game effectively makes you a funder, playtester and executive of the game. Again, Early Access does have some success stories (one could argue that Minecraft was one, despite never actually being released under the Early Access system, due to originally being released while still in the Alpha stage of development) and it is an idea that, while I don't necessarily completely agree with the idea behind it, I can see the appeal to it.
In practice, however, Early Access suffers from the same problem that pre-orders and Kickstarter do: you don't know what you're getting yourself in for when you pay money for it. And, again, like with Kickstarter, if the product turns out not to be worth the asking price, you cannot cancel your order or get your money back: you have paid for it and you have to live with that knowledge. Now, Early Access is arguably better than Kickstarter in that, with the game actually released, you could feasibly take the time to wait for someone to review it before you consider buying it: just wait a week or two after the release date and someone will have a review of it up somewhere on the internet! However, unlike Kickstarter, you are very likely to have to deal with things like missing features in the game, which can ultimately leave you playing a game that can only get away with the fact it's incomplete because it advertised that it isn't done yet. On top of that, it is a system that can be exploited, and you only need to look around Steam's Early Access games to see games which came out and then were promptly forgotten about by their developers the moment they started getting money thrown at them.
I say what I do not to discourage people from supporting the projects they want to see succeed, only to remind them that an excellent idea for a product is not the same as an excellent product: only a finished product that is excellent is an excellent product, as an unfinished product or an idea for one still leave the question of what the final product is actually going to be like. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that The Matrix was a terribly made film, shot on cheap hand held cameras with very bad directing and with acting that would make a porn star look like a classically trained Shakespearian actor (...OK, I just made myself laugh picturing a pornography in the style of a Shakespeare play! It's times like this that I love doing blogging...). Would the film have still been an excellent product in that case? No, of course not! But it would have still been an excellent idea for a film. That is the crucial difference between a good product and a good idea for one: the good product can be confirmed to be a good product because it's actually been made, but the good idea could be horribly botched when it's actually made and all of the potential behind the idea would not be able to save it from being a bad product. Incidentally, this is also why a well made film does not necessarily equal a good film: some films are born for ideas which quite frankly should have not even made it off the ground, but, thanks to having a good budget, are still well made on a technical level. If you will, a expertly sculpted statue of a giant piece of shit made from pure gold and covered with emeralds, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, at the end of the day, is still a giant piece of shit: the fact it's been sculpted from a valuable metal, covered with previous stones and been done by an expert hand does not automatically make it something you'd want to display for all of your friends to see!
...OK, I'll admit, that doesn't make quite as much sense when typed out as it did in my head.
Anyway, the same kind of logic that you can see with Early Access and Kickstarter is the same logic that runs PledgeMusic: you give a band money to record an album that you might be doing completely blind (I've seen bands funding their debut albums on the site, and without providing any demo recordings on their page to help me to see if the album's going to be to my liking!). And, while I do think that there's far more reason to want to support an up and coming band and allow them to record their album over a video game company due to how much it can cost to record an album (some local ones I've seen can come to nearly £100 per day...and that's just for the studio on its own!), there does come a point when I have to say that Bandcamp is a far better place to want to go as a music consumer to go support bands who are unsigned instead of PledgeMusic. In fact, in terms of overall service, I'd say Bandcamp is going above and beyond the call of duty, as you can stream whatever you're interested in without needing to pay for it first, which can be a godsend if you're living on limited funds and can't afford to risk buying something that you don't like. It also is very clearly laid out: I still have no idea if I can download fully funded projects on PledgeMusic, which means that some albums which I want to consider picking up for review work might well be completely inaccessible to me, while, with Bandcamp, you have it pretty clearly marked out. I guess you could say that Bandcamp is a bit like what Steam was like prior to the influx of Early Access games (and the easily abusable greenlight system, now I think on it...), only being for music instead of games. PledgeMusic, by contrast, is the music version of Kickstarter, with a bit of Early Access thrown in for good measure.
Yet...I don't dislike PledgeMusic at all. As easy as it would be to tear PledgeMusic a new one just because it's got the potential to be abused in the same way that Kickstarter has been in the past, I haven't heard of any issues with PledgeMusic. Maybe it's because I've not found the music scenes version of Jimquisition yet and, as such, any controversies connected to it have completely missed my notice, but the only time I've heard of anything resembling an issue related to PledgeMusic is when Timo Tolkki was going to do a second Classical Variations and Themes album, which he cancelled in late July 2012 after it had been in development since April of the same year (although the fact that it seems to have morphed into his Avalon project, which I really liked the first album of, doesn't annoy me too much!): apart from that, it seems that PledgeMusic has managed to avoid things going badly wrong in that way! Plus, the fact that PledgeMusic does have projects on the site where the pledge is purely for extras, with the product itself already done, does at least mean that I feel a bit more confident that I could feasibly use the site as a place to pre-order albums which I think sound like they could be particularly interesting (as I have done with Queensryche's upcoming release (which I think is going to be a new studio album, judging from the comments on their page) and am vaguely considering doing with the upcoming studio album by Michael Sweet and George Lynch, because...well, it's Michael Sweet and George Lynch in a band together, how often are you going to see THAT happening?).
So yeah...while I think there is the potential for PledgeMusic to be just as bad as Kickstarter and, as such, would not blame anyone for approaching it with more than a bit of suspicion, I think there is the potential for it to work out very well. I would like them to make their layouts a bit more clear when it comes to already funded projects so that you know whether you can get a download of the release from the site or not and I think their search system is a bit oddly done (instead of putting the search in alphabetical order, regardless of the status of every pledge, why not put the still open pledges at the top of the search list, especially if it is the case that you can't download material from concluded pledges?), but I certainly can see PledgeMusic being a good way for up and coming bands to get their name out there. I just would recommend that you be vigilant and do your research before you supply funds to a band you've never heard of, for that could save you from potentially ending up in a nasty situation in the future!
...Oh yeah, and, just so I can officially check this off my list of things that I've always wanted to say: "Thank God for me!"
...Now to start checking the mail for letter bombs or cease and desist letters from Jim Sterling, I guess!
No comments:
Post a Comment