British industry body UK Music released its first mobile game yesterday, in partnership with the Intellectual Property Office and Aardman Animations. It sees you playing a music company, signing and developing artists, sending them on tour and releasing tracks – including deciding whether to make them available as physical, downloads and streams, and watching the ratio of legal to pirated copies. The aim is partly to make people think about the impact of music piracy, although in the tech blogosphere that’s led to some headlines like Engadget’s “Music Inc. is anti-piracy propaganda posing as a casual game”. Our constructive criticism would be slightly different: once you get a handle on its mechanics, Music Inc. is actually a bit too easy. After a couple of hours’ play last night, we had £109m in the bank, a £10m headquarters and a lead artist who would do 10m legal sales every release. Piracy was irrelevant in our company’s march to success, which makes its value as “anti-piracy propaganda” debatable, to say the least. That said, Music Inc. is fun to play, and an inventive move from a body like UK Music.
Link (iOS) – http://tinyurl.com/oofr8oz
Link (Android) – http://tinyurl.com/ovlqxgm
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