So, there’s a new (ish) app out there about music management on the iOS app store. It’s called Music Inc (originally released at the end of February). I’ve been busy playing some other things that are mostly Pokémon on my Nintendo 2DS (and what) since then, so it took me a while to get around to playing it.
Purported as a sort of Championship Manager for Music, it actually turns out that it’s far from that in the real world. It’s pretty much some gamified propaganda from the Intellectual Property Office and UK Music, put together by Aardman. Besides the fact it’s either ludicrously formulaic or I’m just brilliant at video games (or both), there’s a few things in there that made we wince a bit…
1. Bad Graphs
When teaching people about piracy (and I do appreciate that the idea is educating people about the damage piracy does and can do), it’s definitely a good idea not to use bad graphs and some seemingly random numbers that suggest some things that probably aren’t actually true. Check out the numbers of pirated downloads vs sales here and check out the graph. It’s deliberately misleading, and it also counts the total as “Legal” and “Pirate” together, and after incorporating streams it doesn’t actually make any sense of their impact.
2. Throwing Money at Stuff = Success
Another great lesson in the app that totally works in real life is that once you’ve got enough money to Team Up with the most expensive producer you can find (£150k a song), you’re basically going to make the money back twice over, regardless of anything like timing, song title, genre of band or, well, just anything. Just throw money at stuff and the game virtually cashes out for you.
3. Physical Single Releases as Often As Possible = Success
Music Inc’s mechanism not only teaches us that an artist should release single after single to make money (throwing money at said single in the above fashion), they should also release them physically for maximum revenue. Hands up if you’ve bought a physical single recently? Nope.
Music Inc really wound me up. I went in expecting a full-fledged / decent artist management game that I’d enjoy, and came out feeling like I was being bullshitted. I’m sure some lovely hands and minds worked on the game, but it was impossible to enjoy in the end because I just couldn’t get over how little sense some of it made. If it wasn’t make / promoted by a government related organisation I probably wouldn’t care at all about it, but from an official source it’s a bit, well, disconcerting just how simplistic they’ve made everything. Regardless, I still played it until I was £12,000,000 up, so I’m pretty confident I’d be a sick manager now. Get in touch.
TOM AYLOT