Cassettes
Give PC musicians more to do!

Pretty sure this has been suggested once (?) before, but I can't remember the thread otherwise I'd link it.

Anyway, being a PC musician is problematic, whether it be because of clashing timezones for performances, the nature of there being barely any instruments, or the nature of the music your PC makes.

I'm proposing something like cassettes. A character would "record" their music onto these cassettes similar to how a tailor adds messages for a piece of cloth (possibly by slotting a blank cassette into an all in one recorder or something similar so it makes more sense).

A character could then add separate songs by first deciding on a title, then adding separate lines to describe the progression of the song. Each side of the cassette could have a flat limit of songs (something like 4 maybe?), as well as possibly a short few lines describing the cover art (or lack thereof) when someone looks at the cassette.

These cassettes could then be inserted into either:

- Personal Speakers(can be heard by you and anyone who watches it)

- Jukebox (can be heard by everyone in room and produces *you can hear loud music coming from x direction* in adjacent rooms, and also has the ability to insert multiple cassettes)

- Personal media players (can only be heard by you)

There could also be two versions of the cassettes:

- Pacwest/bootleg variant - cheap, supposedly lower quality, used widely in the mix

- NLM variant, topside, more expensive, supposedly higher quality, NLM automatically owns the rights to anything recorded on these cassettes no matter how bad the music is

I'm sure with the help of scripters, we could get some themely music cassettes circulating in the markets so that owners of speakers/media players have even more stuff to play, on top of PC created cassettes.

Yes pls. I want to jog around the mix with the Sindome equivalent of a Walkman.

Balance wise, maybe you don't need the artistry roll to make music, but you need some sort of tech skill in order to record it and make the cassette? So musicians could hire techies to record down their greatest hits.

This was suggested many times, and everyone wants this.

Just want to say, I am for this 100% and I would love an item that is basically a TV which then transmits loudly to the room and maybe even the surrounding rooms the recordings of songs or whatever.

You get your e-note, write the stuff then burn it into a holo-casset and then play it in your portable boom-box.

In paper this idea sounds great, I think the reason we might not have this is something some players might not know about, which is something we call 'bulk'.

Mainly you don't want players to be able to produce items in a massive way, because it messes up the moo's memory or whatnot. Something similar happens with cameras and how they work.

Maybe we are at a junction where the game could take this, I don't know.

But it would be great for low end musicians to be able to have something like this, instead of having to depend always on live or TV performances. It would surely motivate folks and enrich the game culture.

There is only one copy of a TV program. Cassettes would be more like flyers - print a blizzard of them, leave them for other people to trash or recycle.

I really do feel there needs to be more incentive to play a performer. It's a ton of work for very little payout, many people start down this path and burn out as a result. I think something like this would be great as it creates a permanent copy of your work. I could really see it functioning like candy manufacturing, you need a recording location and someone with the skills to produce it. Better facilities and higher skills combined with the artists skills make something worth more. This means it takes a lot of effort to make one, it isn't something you do on a whim.

Now to really go out on a limb, what if you can sell these recordings to clubs and such for their value, in turn they are played for a set amount of time. This would give performers something akin to selling to gangers and the time limit keeps bloat down while creating an entire competitive market for support skills.

https://www.sindome.org/bgbb/game-discussion/ideas/music-industry-710/#last

Original thread.