Auhim on 01 March 2009
You don't need a Live Gold account for DLC. The only time Gold users get an advantage with respect to DLC is a very occasional timed advantage. (This tends to be a week long delay before Silver users can also download.)
Any DLC is downloadable by Silver accounts. Gold accounts are needed for online play and Netflix Streaming.
I had quite a bit of DLC for games on my system before I bothered to upgrade to Gold.
