When the AIO Facebook page first posted a photo of a script called “The Launch” fans immediately got excited about what we thought was a recording session for Album 58. This takes away our freedom to buy AIO episodes from other places because the club will be the only place to get these exclusive episodes, so it would be a waste of money to buy anything else from anywhere else. In other words, fully produced high quality Adventures in Odyssey episodes that are apparently canon but locked behind a massive paywall that most fans who have already collected many of the albums will be unlikely to have the opportunity to listen to. Perhaps Focus on the Family realized this and came up with a solution to give us another incentive to join the club: exclusive club episodes. There will quickly come a point when maintaining a subscription to the club will no longer be cost-effective. In a number of years you will have paid for the equivalent of all the albums produced and will begin losing money. Normally one album costs around $20 and paying for the club for a year adds up to $180, the equivalent of nine albums a year, which of course is unsustainable. For that price it would only make sense to join the club if you don’t own many AIO albums to begin with. The first red flag was that it appears this service will cost around $15 a month. But like I said, this isn’t a problem as long as you have the freedom of choice to access AIO content from a variety of sources. So in that sense you wouldn’t actually own the episodes, you’d be renting them and require a constant internet connection to access them.
#ADVENTURES IN ODYSSEY CLUB DOWNLOAD#
With the club you presumably wouldn’t be able to download episodes, or at least have a very limited number of downloads per year, otherwise someone could just buy a subscription for one month, download 25 years worth of Odyssey and then cancel their subscription.
As long as people still have the option of listening on the radio, online, or buying CDs or digital downloads, adding the club as yet another option seems perfectly reasonable. And that’s exactly what this new club sounded like: a place where you have access to every Odyssey episode on demand for a monthly subscription fee. After the 24/7 web radio was shut down due to financial constraints, the fans asked for it to be replaced by some kind of paid subscription service. The Odyssey Adventure Club started off sounding like a great idea.
Hopefully changes are made to the club because as it stands now it looks like it may have a negative impact on fans. I was planning to postpone writing this editorial until more information about the Odyssey Adventure Club was officially announced, but as more and more pieces of information come out the more I get concerned about the direction Adventures in Odyssey is going.
0 kommentar(er)
