I just bought 2 packs of addon music for Guild Wars from Direct Song. For $12 I doubled the amount of music in the game, and increased the quality of all of it. That's pretty sweet. If you are into game music like me, you ought to check this out.

www.directsong.com

Jeremy Soule is pretty amazing and what a cool way to get more of his music! Only possible downside is that it's all WMA protected stuff. But you get 4 permanent licenses and can burn it if you want to. But the fact that the game will pick it up and use it is the cake for me. It's obviously important for them to keep people from putting this up on eMule so I guess I agree with the decision to use protected audio.
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I'm not a big fan of prices that are wildly disproportionate to the actual cost of the item, and no matter how good the music might be, $12 for some downloaded music (that is copy protected to boot) is simply too much in my opinion. Falls into the "rip-off" category for me...
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It's 120+ mins of music for $12. $6 per 65mins or so. Unless you think it should be free, I don't see a problem lol.
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DirectSong is a very good idea - the ability to expand a games music content by downloading small add-on packs is great. Also, $6 for over an hours extra music content is not a rip-off at all - composers deserve to be paid. Also, the first music pack for Guild Wars expansion was completely free (as was the expansion!).
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$6 per hour, with no hardcopy and DRM on top... Meh. Yeah, composers should get paid, but this is excessive IMO.
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I already converted them to MP3. You burn them to CD right in WMPlayer and rip that and then encode with LAME say. It is a small inconvenience and quality loss (very little if you use --preset-extreme in LAME) in order to protect his music.

I've spent $2 per SONG for some direct downloads from a favorite trance label of mine. They started with high bitrate WMA and moved to 256kbps MP3. I don't think they should've honestly, but considering I can log into Direct Connect hubs and find a copy of any of these songs in CD rip form in 10 seconds I guess it's pointless anyway. WMA can be a lot higher quality than any MP3 if it's used right, granted there are of course other formats too. They were selling 24-bit WMAs. People probably bitched and moaned about their Cmedia and Realtek chips not being able to play it, and the slight inconvenience of the protection I suppose.

As a consumer of these tunes I don't have any interest in shareability. I paid for them to work in the game and others should have to as well. You can probably log onto your fav P2P prog and find the releases on there in MP3 already. The main soundtrack is out on CD in stores I believe too. But, it won't work in the game unless you pay the whopping $6 per pack for the online edition. Certainly less than the soundtrack CD in stores and far more usable overall.
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