Valve Updates How You can Buy Music on Steam

For the longest time, if you wanted to enjoy a games soundtrack but you didnt want to just stream it like a normal person, you could sometimes find the OST being sold on Steam. It was a good enough system, but it had some pretty big flaws if you were an audiophile, or if you had the game from some other source and you didnt want to buy it again just to get the soundtrack DLC.

Which is why it should be good news to all you music fans out there that Steam is making some pretty radical changes to how its going to start selling soundtracks from here on out: namely, theyre going to offer a soundtrack app that can be purchased all by its lonesome on Steam.

Herere the big differences:

• customers can now purchase soundtracks without purchasing the base game.
• customers can now download soundtracks without downloading the base game.
• customers can browse and manage their owned and downloaded soundtracks directly from the new Steam library.
• customers can configure a Steam "music" directory where all soundtrack content will be placed, rather than having to locate it in subdirectories of game content.
• developers can upload and manage soundtrack content entirely through the partner site, without using steamcmd.
• developers can sell soundtracks where the base game itself is not available for sale on Steam.

But it also comes with new features, such as the ability to upload audio files with multiple quality levels, a brand-new music interface, and the ability to spice out soundtracks with extra code and cool content.

They're also including a way to convert your current DLC soundtracks to the new system, which will allow you to access them easier, and even play them on the Steam client.

This might not be the most earth-shattering thing to hit Steam, but I, for one, am pretty excited to see it.