Thursday, September 18, 2008

D-Mag Guitar Hero Appears on Yahoo

Yahoo picked up on the D-Mag Guitar Hero story. Good for them. It's nothing new that we haven't already known for days, but the event has been distilled to a news item for the wires. I expect we'll see this popping up all over the place.

The focus of all the attention is shock, shock that a videogame would provide better music than a commercial CD. That's a good hook, so I can't knock it, but I think the real news item is the way the music business' loudness wars has reached a new plateau. Death Magnetic is very nearly the most heavily brickwalled album to date, and the backlash is considerably larger than it's been in the past.

The question now is whether the next question on everybody's minds - will Metallica feel the pressure to remix their new album? - will be planted in the traditional media. That's the ultimate question for most fans, I think. This isn't simply a case of "gee, whiz, that game sounds better than my CD." It's a case of a major album release that's virtually unlistenable. We're dangerously close to doing away with music altogether and just releasing static.

It'll be a new genre of pop music - Channel Zero.

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