Good take on the Guitar Hero Song Pricing Kerfuffle

In case you missed it last week, the internets were abuzz with the griping of many a gamer.

This is of course true of every week, but the target of last week's ire seemed to largely be directed at the pricing/packaging of downloadable song content. (3 songs priced at ~$6.50). The griping being directed (a) at the price of >$2 a song, more expensive that iTunes and they are covers at that, and (b) at the packaging, necesitating the purchase of 3 songs at once.

While I have *no idea* on what the real story is (not involved in that part of Microsoft at all), and while I'm not saying whether the pricing strategy is a good or bad one, I did think that this post by DonkeyXote was a good take on the subject. He's a lawyer who works with our games group (but did not work on GH2 in any way), and his post goes over some of the complexities involved in digital distribution of music, performers rights societies, etc.

I'd label this 'what you have when the round peg of new technology, new mediums, and new business models is smashed into the square hole of antiquated organizations and business models; and what happens when people try to get it to work.