13. For Fifteen Dollars More
How exclusive club episodes will split the AIO fandom.
By David Hilder | September 28, 2013
How exclusive club episodes will split the AIO fandom.
By David Hilder | September 28, 2013
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. Hopefully changes are made to the club because as it stands now it looks like it may have a negative impact on fans.
The Odyssey Adventure Club started off sounding like a great idea. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The first red flag was that it appears this service will cost around $15 a month. That seems a little high. For that price it would only make sense to join the club if you don’t own many AIO albums to begin with. 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. In a number of years you will have paid for the equivalent of all the albums produced and will begin losing money. There will quickly come a point when maintaining a subscription to the club will no longer be cost-effective.
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. 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. 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.
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. But then it was revealed that The Launch, Parts 1 & 2, will be the first exclusive club episodes. This was a big disappointment and it was when the concept of exclusivity began to sink in. These exclusive episodes are going to be very exclusive indeed. Unlike normal episodes, which every fan can listen to for free on the radio or online when they air, these episodes are only going to be able to fans who are willing and able to pay $180 a year, every year. I can’t imagine many fans are going to go for this, but even if a large amount of people do, there is a guarantee that a huge number of fans will never have access to these shows. Even at a fraction of the cost, a paywall will still act as a stumbling block in the way of the distribution and recognition of these episodes.
A split in the AIO fandom will be created between those who have these shows and those who don’t. For myself, if I was in the club I would feel guilty about having access to something other people have no hope in sharing in, and if I wasn’t in the club I would frequently have the nagging feeling that I’m missing out on the full Odyssey experience. Many of the most devoted fans, who have bought all the albums, don’t want to be forced to make the choice between either joining this expensive club or risk missing out on the continuing stories of their favorite characters.
And that brings me to the announcement that these exclusive episodes will most likely be canon. I don’t see how that’s possible if a large portion of the fandom won’t be allowed to hear them or buy them outside of the club. How can we have character development in these shows if they will be missing from the regular albums? The reason the video series created Dylan Taylor instead of using kids from the radio show is because keeping character development consistent across two shows with different release schedules would be too difficult. And one of the reasons a spin-off radio show about Odyssey for older listeners wasn’t developed was because it would disrupt the development of the characters who would appear on both the original show and the new show at the same time. This kind of thing only works for shows whose characters never change, and I don’t see AIO moving in that direction.
As I mentioned in my editorial about Passages, on page 571 of the 2012 Official Guide it clearly says the AIO team felt “fans would be unhappy if [they] didn’t release two regular Odyssey packages each year.” But is that still their policy? Instead of making the club a positive thing, it’s become a negative thing. Because instead of the club giving us an extra 12 exclusive episodes we wouldn’t normally get, which I still don’t think would be a good idea, they are taking away 12 of their yearly amount in order for these club episodes to be truly exclusive. Just as the Official Guide quote suggests, either fans will be forced to join the club or they’re going to be unhappy. I don’t want to make comparisons to Bart Rathbone, but this seems like something he might do. If you want to keep listening to the yearly episodes you’ve always enjoyed, it’s going to start costing a lot more.
This seems like a big problem and it is. It has the potential to frustrate and sadden a large portion of the fandom. But it also has an easy solution. The issue here isn’t really the price as much as it is the whole concept of exclusive episodes. Fans shouldn’t be forced to go all or nothing. If a fan wants to buy 12 episodes, their only option shouldn’t be getting a club membership that they will continually have to pay for as long as they want to have access to those episodes. That doesn’t seem fair.
The only adequate solution to this I think would be to get rid of the idea of exclusive club episodes. I’m glad the AIO team has decided to make 24 episodes a year, but I’m not so enthusiastic about their decision to keep half of those episodes hidden from a lot of devoted fans who would be happy to buy them if they were available outside this very exclusive club. I don’t really care if the club were to get to listen to episodes months in advance or even get exclusive behind-the-scenes information about the show. But the episodes themselves should be available to everyone who identities as an Odyssey fan. I sincerely hope this editorial will become outdated soon because I think changes need to be made to the club. And I hope Focus on the Family does decide to make these club episodes available for purchase outside the Odyssey Adventure Club.
The Odyssey Adventure Club started off sounding like a great idea. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The first red flag was that it appears this service will cost around $15 a month. That seems a little high. For that price it would only make sense to join the club if you don’t own many AIO albums to begin with. 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. In a number of years you will have paid for the equivalent of all the albums produced and will begin losing money. There will quickly come a point when maintaining a subscription to the club will no longer be cost-effective.
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. 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. 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.
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. But then it was revealed that The Launch, Parts 1 & 2, will be the first exclusive club episodes. This was a big disappointment and it was when the concept of exclusivity began to sink in. These exclusive episodes are going to be very exclusive indeed. Unlike normal episodes, which every fan can listen to for free on the radio or online when they air, these episodes are only going to be able to fans who are willing and able to pay $180 a year, every year. I can’t imagine many fans are going to go for this, but even if a large amount of people do, there is a guarantee that a huge number of fans will never have access to these shows. Even at a fraction of the cost, a paywall will still act as a stumbling block in the way of the distribution and recognition of these episodes.
A split in the AIO fandom will be created between those who have these shows and those who don’t. For myself, if I was in the club I would feel guilty about having access to something other people have no hope in sharing in, and if I wasn’t in the club I would frequently have the nagging feeling that I’m missing out on the full Odyssey experience. Many of the most devoted fans, who have bought all the albums, don’t want to be forced to make the choice between either joining this expensive club or risk missing out on the continuing stories of their favorite characters.
And that brings me to the announcement that these exclusive episodes will most likely be canon. I don’t see how that’s possible if a large portion of the fandom won’t be allowed to hear them or buy them outside of the club. How can we have character development in these shows if they will be missing from the regular albums? The reason the video series created Dylan Taylor instead of using kids from the radio show is because keeping character development consistent across two shows with different release schedules would be too difficult. And one of the reasons a spin-off radio show about Odyssey for older listeners wasn’t developed was because it would disrupt the development of the characters who would appear on both the original show and the new show at the same time. This kind of thing only works for shows whose characters never change, and I don’t see AIO moving in that direction.
As I mentioned in my editorial about Passages, on page 571 of the 2012 Official Guide it clearly says the AIO team felt “fans would be unhappy if [they] didn’t release two regular Odyssey packages each year.” But is that still their policy? Instead of making the club a positive thing, it’s become a negative thing. Because instead of the club giving us an extra 12 exclusive episodes we wouldn’t normally get, which I still don’t think would be a good idea, they are taking away 12 of their yearly amount in order for these club episodes to be truly exclusive. Just as the Official Guide quote suggests, either fans will be forced to join the club or they’re going to be unhappy. I don’t want to make comparisons to Bart Rathbone, but this seems like something he might do. If you want to keep listening to the yearly episodes you’ve always enjoyed, it’s going to start costing a lot more.
This seems like a big problem and it is. It has the potential to frustrate and sadden a large portion of the fandom. But it also has an easy solution. The issue here isn’t really the price as much as it is the whole concept of exclusive episodes. Fans shouldn’t be forced to go all or nothing. If a fan wants to buy 12 episodes, their only option shouldn’t be getting a club membership that they will continually have to pay for as long as they want to have access to those episodes. That doesn’t seem fair.
The only adequate solution to this I think would be to get rid of the idea of exclusive club episodes. I’m glad the AIO team has decided to make 24 episodes a year, but I’m not so enthusiastic about their decision to keep half of those episodes hidden from a lot of devoted fans who would be happy to buy them if they were available outside this very exclusive club. I don’t really care if the club were to get to listen to episodes months in advance or even get exclusive behind-the-scenes information about the show. But the episodes themselves should be available to everyone who identities as an Odyssey fan. I sincerely hope this editorial will become outdated soon because I think changes need to be made to the club. And I hope Focus on the Family does decide to make these club episodes available for purchase outside the Odyssey Adventure Club.
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