Music Discussions

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Rock Band franchise of games as much as the next person who can’t play a real guitar, but it does have several major issues.

First of all, the price for downloadable content is pretty steep. A typical song costs 160 points and it costs $1.00 for 80 points (1600 points for $20, and 2000 points for $25 for instance). This means that most songs cost $2 a piece. Considering that iTunes charges about half of that for a song and you can listen to it anywhere, $2 for a song that you can only listen to while playing a video game is rather expensive. This cost would be more justifiable if it were possible to play the purchased content in the Xbox 360’s media player, but this is not the case. Nor does the purchaser receive an mp3 version of the song to play on other devices.

The second, and only other major issue that I have with Rock Band, is its censorship policy. Even though there are settings allowing parents to lock out content above a certain rating on the Xbox 360, all of Rock Band’s songs are censored if there is any "objectionable" content. I understand that the game could be of less wide appeal if "B.Y.O.B." or "Man in the Box" were left uncensored, or if they were not available for people to play if they had their system set to block content above a certain age category (as there would be less playable content), but there are two viable options.

The first – and, in my opinion, better – option is to include two versions of each song that may offend certain groups. Depending on the settings on an individual system, either the censored or original version would be played. This way, people like me who are against censorship would be able to listen to and play songs the way the original artist intended, while others would be able to block lyrics that they feel are inappropriate.

The slightly worse, but still acceptable option would be to provide two versions of each purchasable song and allow users to pick which one they wanted to download. This makes each user responsible for what they purchase, but someone could accidentally purchase the wrong copy and be out of the money. Also, either the songs that came on the game disc would still all be censored, or there would have to be two versions of the game – which could also lead to confusion.

Instead of picking either of these options though, the developer decided to censor everyone’s copy of the music and leave no alternatives. This fact, coupled with the comparatively high prices of the songs, lowers the overall playing experience. The game is great, but implementing these two simple improvements would make it even better. Hopefully these issues will be fixed in future releases.