In this age of free downloads, diminishing royalties, and pirating, in the last decade the music business has taken a huge hit to their bottom line. Not that it was ever easy to “make it” in music in the first place.
So how does a band these days book a financially successful tour and boost record and CD sales along the way? Well, there are a few basic tips I thought I would share in this short sample of a game called “You’re an American Band.”
Click here to play game
For this to actually be a useful and informative game to teach people how to break into the music business, you’d need to add a lot more steps and information. This game is really a prototype and now that it’s set up, it would be easy to add more points along the “tour route” with additional tips.
Click here to play German drinking game
I built this game from a template created by Jackie Van Nice. And Jackie created her template based on a German drinking game she built a few months back. Thank you Jackie for sharing your awesome template with the e-learning community.
Renovations
Building a course or game from a template is kind of like renovating a house. You’re pulling out the carpet and putting in hard wood floors here, replacing wallpaper with paint there, and sometimes even tearing down a wall or two. The whole idea behind using an existing template is re-purposing.
Mapping it Out
I’ve always loved maps and when I saw that Jackie’s original game worked off of a map of Germany, I realized I could replace that with a tour map and that my game could be about a rock band booking an east coast tour. That was where the whole idea was born.
Tour map
Each point on the map led to a challenge question, so all I had to do was come up with a list of questions about booking rock shows and then just tie them into each city along the tour route.
Challenge is presented
The Progress Meter
Jackie had a progress meter appear after each question was answered correctly. Hers actually showed a beer mug slowly getting filled. Since mine was about boosting CD sales, I had CDs slowly stacking up on a spool with a caption showing how many CD sales the band had racked up.
CD tower progress meter
DIY
Being a musician myself, I took some previously recorded song and guitar bits I had and inserted them into the introduction and the map sections. I also used some standard sound effects such as tympani rolls on the CD sales progress meter, some crowd noises, and other sounds for the feedback layers as well.
Click here to play the game
This is the End
For the conclusion slide, I show our hero playing in front of a huge crowd with a Spinal Tap quote thrown in for a little comic relief. Overall, this was a very oversimplified lesson on how to make it in the music business, but really you could put in whatever content you want and it could easily be made into a very useful teaching tool for people in that industry.
E-Learning With Dan 