The Collectors
Collectors of video games music are like collectors of anything else. They tend to be far more interested with the size of their collection, or the rarity of certain pieces, than the actual quality of any given element.
On the web, you’ll find a buttload of websites that offer clips of video game music, MIDI files of video game music, re-mixes, cover bands doing video game music, ringtones, top 10 blog lists…99.9% of which, in typical Internet fashion, is about half moronic crap and half advertisements.
I appreciate the access to original clips, should I ever want to hear them. Of course, they were probably recorded by someone who doesn’t really understand basic audio theory, so they tend to be fairly poor quality and either way too low or so high that every other beat distorts (you know, like most of the videos on YouTube). So they’re not really doing the source material justice, but in most cases the source material really doesn’t deserve too much justice anyway.
The re-mixes and cover tunes are also mostly horrible quality, but that’s not as much the fault of bad audio levels (though that is also an issue) as it is the really stupid idea to do it in the first place. Yeah, one out of maybe 1,000 are actually funny or impressive in some way, but it’s most likely to work on someone who hasn’t already heard a zillion such humorous cover tune attempts — and at this point, that’s pretty much nobody. At best, it’s a throwaway joke, which helps to contribute to the idea that music is a disposable commodity produced by amateurs without any real creativity or talent. Isn’t the world full of crappy remakes already? At least make something crappy but original…(/rant)
Oh well, no need to get all worked up. If I was really bothered by mediocrity, I’d probably have to turn off the Internet completely, and I’m not sure that I’m ready for that just yet. Maybe this year’s New Years Resolution…