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As June 25th creeps slowly towards me, I can't help but feel giddy at
the thought of being in the same room as one of my personal heroes,
Mr. Nobuo Uematsu. A combined wave of respect and fanboyishness
rushes over me when I think about going to the "Dear Friends: Music
from Final Fantasy" concert in Atlanta, in the coming months. From a
professional standpoint, I see Mr. Uematsu as one of the greatest
minds of our time, bringing music into a medium that focuses mainly on
graphical prowess and game play, rather than on music itself. This has
obviously come with great rewards for him too, with the greatest
selling video game soundtrack of all time (that being the Final
Fantasy VII soundtrack) under his belt and having successful tours
around Japan and, more recently, the United States. From a gamer
standpoint, I see Mr. Uematsu as a fun guy who loves what he does,
knows how to rock out, and brings hours of enjoyment to people all
around the world, as evidenced by many fan remixes in different genres
posted all over the internet.
Mr. Uematsu isn't the only musical talent in the videogame industry
though. Many other talented artists exist around the game world, most
notably Yasunori Mitsuda, whose brilliant work can be heard on the
Chrono Cross (Square) and Xenosaga (Namco) soundtracks, and on the Star Ocean: Till
the End of Time (Square-Enix) collaboration soundtrack with Motoi
Sakuraba, who worked on the music for Baten Kaitos (Namco). Their brilliance in their
field makes for hours and hours of enjoyable music for not just video
game fans, but music lovers everywhere. Video game soundtracks are of
a large quantity, especially in Japan. Some artists are so popular
that the companies that back them release several versions of the
soundtracks, such as arranged albums, piano collections, and various
other stylized versions of the same tracks. They are all wonderful,
however, here in the United States I've run into a problem getting
music from outside the country from the places I love most.
In order to get pumped up for the Final Fantasy Concert I am going to
attend, I decided to go out and buy the soundtracks
to Mr. Uematsu's games. I wanted to own
them, not just for personal enjoyment, but for the sentimental value
of the actual CD being in my collection of random videogame
memorabilia. As a music pirate, using such programs as kazaa and
Morpheus, Final Fantasy music is unbearably easy to come by for me, but
downloading music has its obvious risks. Some tracks are named
incorrectly, some cut are off before finishing, and others are hardcore
pornography instead of what you're REALLY looking for. Since downloading
all the music wasn't an option, I went out to look for them the old
fashioned way. Being a regular hermit, and cringing at sunlight, I
sacrificed my time inside my house to go look for something I REALLY
wanted. I searched high and low. Wal-mart, K-mart, Target, Best Buy,
Coconuts, EBgames, EBX, Gamestop, Toys-R-Us, Sam Goody, Borders. None
of them carried videogame soundtracks, or anything similar that might
even resemble a soundtrack by a foreign artist. Of course, I didn't
expect large retail chains like Wal-Mart and Target to carry them, but
I looked as a last resort. When I couldn't find what I was looking
for, I did the sensible thing. I looked on the internet. Having no
credit card was a burden, so naturally I had backup support in the
form of cash, which went in the hand of whoever lent me their card to
buy stuff online. EBay is too risky, you never know if you'll get what
you order, and it's a roll of the dice. Identity theft is a major
concern these days as well. So eBay was out. Large commercial online
stores like AnimeNation.com sell at an alarming price range. I'm
sorry, but I refuse to pay 50 bucks for one CD with only 13 tracks. So
after searching high and low, I finally find a site with decent prices
and a more than decent selection. This site is GKworld.com.
Unfortunately, I'm only telling you the name of this site to keep you
from it. As I now realize, the store sells Bootleg copies of Final
Fantasy CD's. This really isn't that bad considering I only bought one
CD from them at the time, but it has sparked an internal debate in my
house about what I should do. Let me elaborate.
As many of you already know, a bootleg is a copy of a CD, sold at a
fraction of the cost. When someone gets the original CD and sells 20
of them at a fraction of what they paid for the original CD, they can
get their 20 or so dollars back triple fold. The main problem I have
with this isn't the quality of the CDs. They're perfect looking and come
with CD cases, sleeves/booklets, and labels on the CD, making them
LOOK authentic; but it's just not the real deal. Not only that, but
the money I pay for the CD doesn't go to my favorite artist, who
worked their ass off producing the music itself. It goes to the site
owner, who did nothing but screw the original artist out of some cash.
While all this seems negative, the actual music is still there. Should
I settle for something less than the real thing because it's for
something that I love? Would the artist appreciate me buying from the
middleman just to hear his music just because I KNOW it's him? On the
one hand, Mr. Uematsu might be happy just knowing that I'm getting his
music, which he made for us fans to begin with. I hear the record
companies get most of the profits on CD sales anyways, and major
income for artists is in concert sales (or in this particular case,
the artists being paid by the videogame companies to produce the
music in the first place). But on the other hand, they might get
pissed that they're being screwed out of the tiny percentage the
record companies DO give them. I suppose I'll never know, but at least
I'll have the pleasure to hear the music live with a full orchestra,
and then buy a recording of the performance afterwards...
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