Last week marks my self proclaimed “Clubaversary”, or my first full year purchasing the Club. In that time I’ve started a blog, a Club collection, an AIOWiki account, and listened to nearly every episode, including about 100 Club exclusives. But is it really worth $108 per year? And before we go any further, I’m not sponsored by the Club. Ready? Good.
I remember coming across a blog post created in 2013 stating something along the lines of “The Club would not catch on because people already had albums, and would be comfortable continuing to use them.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Clearly, that wasn’t true, because clearly most fans were willing to chuck out the 100 bucks to acquire this resource. It’s not “very exclusive” as the fan stated. Now, I’m just as unenthusiastic about anyone about two six-episode albums and 12 exclusive basically irrelevant ones. But the Odyssey Adventure Club seemed to be appealing, and I believe so because, well mainly, convenience.
Here’s why streaming services work. They are a quick and easy way to get the content you want. You don’t have to worry about things breaking, and you have an automatic, $10 per month payment. You can watch or listen in a bus, your couch, anywhere! There’s no waiting involved. With the Club specifically, the biggest thing is less clutter. You can ditch all your scratched and broken CDs for a few bucks a month in one phone to listen whenever you want. And unless the internet goes down, your set for a year! The app isn’t the greatest, of course, but it functions, and it really is Odyssey gold.
The argument was since CDs were already a thing. People wouldn’t buy a subscription and ditch piles and piles of anywhere from a few to around 54 albums. I thought, well, this isn’t necessarily true. For example, if I were 15 then, and I got my first CD around 2006, that disk might be scratched and not exactly in the best of conditions. Having [almost] every episode hassle-free would be a dream to me. Besides, now I could take episodes on a train or a plane, instead of being limited to my CD player or my parent’s minivan.
The biggest downfall, is of course, the comment sections. We’ve described what a heckish place that is before, but really, it’s ignoreable. It’s something that should be fixed (an automatic spellchecker would be nice). Another thing is the relatively small amount of downloadable episodes. When going on a long road (or plane) trip, it’s good to have more than 12 episodes at a time, especially when in very remote areas. But that’s a great place to use your giant CD collection anyway. If you bought one of those new-fangled cars without CD ports, that’s kind of sad, but like I said earlier, the app can replace them.
So yes, I stand by my claim that the Club is a very, very good investment for an AIO Fan. If you’re a passive fan or don’t think it’s necessary, that’s true. You can listen on the radio and your CDs. Both are still up and running, last time I checked. But if you have, I dunno, a blog or anything like that, or you really just like Adventures in Odyssey, the yeah! Go for it! Just do it, to borrow the footwear colloquialism. And with that, I leave you with: Anyway,
AIO Writer's Block 