{"id":3733,"date":"2013-07-17T18:08:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T17:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3733"},"modified":"2020-10-11T21:05:31","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T20:05:31","slug":"it-took-you-long-enough-columbia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3733","title":{"rendered":"It Took You Long Enough, Columbia&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"piccytures\/idol\/imas_sf_cds.jpg\" \/><\/center><br \/>\nThose who follow me on Twitter may or may not be aware of my tendency, once a month, to complain about the fact that the new songs for <i>iDOLM@STER Shiny Festa<\/i>, the PSP and iOS iM@S rhythm-action game, had yet to be solicited for release on CD &#8211; mostly the main theme, <i>Music\u00e2\u2122\u00aa<\/i>, though I guess I&#8217;m slightly unusual in preferring <i>Vault that Borderline<\/i> to the other game-specific songs (and, honestly, I&#8217;m really not particularly fussed about <i>Visionary<\/i>).<\/p>\n<p>Now, almost a full year after the the initial release of the game, they&#8217;ve finally actually thrown out release dates for the CDs containing the full versions of the songs. But whilst Columbia may give with one hand, they take with another &#8211; rather than release the songs as singles, they are releasing them across a <i>series<\/i> of <i>2CD collections<\/i>, monikered <i>THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS+ GRE@TEST BEST!<\/i>. Or at least that&#8217;s what I assume is going on &#8211; the CDJapan description currently states that all four of those are on the first CD, but I&#8217;m pretty certain that&#8217;s a misinterpretation of the announcement description.<\/p>\n<p>But, hey, the actual track listings haven&#8217;t been published yet, so the actual contents (and what the &#8216;+&#8217; in &#8216;ALLSTARS+&#8217; signifies) is anybodies guess right now. That the CD sets go by the titles of <i>THE IDOLM@STER HISTORY<\/i>, <i>SWEET\u00ef\u00bc\u2020SMILE!<\/i>, <i>COOL\u00ef\u00bc\u2020BITTER!<\/i> and <i>LOVE&#038;PEACE!<\/i> somewhat tie into the tone and content of Music\u00e2\u2122\u00aa, Visionary, edeN and Vault that Borderline respectively probably spells at least part of their plan here.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the annoyance for me is that, as nice as iM@S collection CDs are, I kind of own a lot of iM@S CDs already, and this probably means I&#8217;m facing shelling out three times as much as I would have otherwise for the sake of four songs given that I&#8217;ve probably got a lot of the content presented here already. I suppose we&#8217;ll see once the full track list is out.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing to bear in mind with this, though, is that this is a wholesale dumping of iM@S music content going on here &#8211; it suggests the end of the milking phase for this particular content. What this signifies is the expectation of both something causing a bump in interest in the franchise, and something causing a significant content refresh. Whilst I&#8217;m certainly looking forward to the upcoming movie, that&#8217;s probably not big enough of an event, and I will point out that the last time they released a collection of Best Of CDs, it was six months ahead of the release of <i>iDOLM@STER 2<\/i>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Which rather stokes the bonfire of expectations regarding the likely upcoming announcement of <i>iDOLM@STER 3<\/i> for early next year&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Just saying, you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Those who follow me on Twitter may or may not be aware of my tendency, once a month, to complain about the fact that the new songs for iDOLM@STER Shiny Festa, the PSP and iOS iM@S rhythm-action game, had yet to be solicited for release on CD &#8211; mostly the main theme, Music\u00e2\u2122\u00aa, though I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idolmaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3733"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6263,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733\/revisions\/6263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}