Harmonix Considering New Track Bundles
While filesharing programs like Napster helped get people acclimated to the idea of digital music as a true alternative to physical media, iTunes undoubtedly has dominance over music sales. Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix has expressed a desire to create an alternative method of buying music.
They’d like to explore the idea of bundling songs together, not just including several Rock Band tracks in one package as they’ve done in the past, but including a copy of a song for use on your computer or MP3 player of choice. He admits that this would “change the tenor” of their relationship with the record labels, but there are likely some other hurdles that would have to be overcome before this is a truly viable business model.
The two biggest problems I can see is how to get the music onto something other than the console, as none of the current consoles are set up to act as a storage library for MP3 players and the appeal of getting a regular version of the song along with the Rock Band track would be limited if you could only listen to it from that console and to simply allow it to be downloaded from a website with a user name would bring up copyright issues. Secondly many gamers might want more of an album or artist than the handful of songs offered up on Rock Band, so they’d be more likely to simply purchase the album elsewhere.