14 DAY TRIAL // You may have heard that there are three brand new song packs out there for your GH II 360, to be downloaded via Xbox Live. Each pack costs around 7 bucks a piece which bring it to just a little over 2 bucks a song. Quite expensive if you think about it. Xbox Live is not a very cheap Internet service. Adding the electricity used to power up the Xbox 360 and TV set, it sounds even worse. In an article I posted yesterday about the new downloadable song packs is all the information you need to understand why it's a total rip off. Everyone thinks the same, but not Microsoft's Major Nelson, as I found in an interview of the man with Joystiq:
"Well, I found out about it late last night, before I posted it. I looked at it and said "okay." But you have to remember, I used to work in the broadcasting industry and in music for a long time and I know that content is not linear. It's not like you go to iTunes, and you're buying the same thing. There's testing that's involved, and there's also licensing involved. There's a lot of elements involved. When there's music involved, that brings up a lot of licensing issues. [pointing at camera] Kids, if you want to make a lot of money, write music. Write the hits, I should say ... It's roughly about $2 a song that you can play over and over. You can't get interactivity with a song on iTunes, and I don't want to defend it: it is what it is."
So these are the reasons why it's so expensive to get the song packs, huh? Then why is it that everything else is expensive on Xbox Live and not everything that's downloadable via this service is part of a bundle. Microsoft has got to do something to get their act together, 'cause sometimes nice talk doesn't fix it.