The Rock Band series has helped introduce thousands of new people to music that they may not have otherwise experienced. Harmonix is looking to expand the music available in in their games via the Rock Band Network.
This new initiative will allow any artist - independent, unsigned or superstars - to submit their music for inclusion in the game. The closed beta for Rock Band Network is running right now with hopes to open publicly by the end of 2009. The entries will be separate from the current Rock Band music store, and will come initially to the Xbox 360, later coming to the PS3 and Wii.
"We've figured out how to make it so anybody who owns and controls masters and publishing can put music into [Rock Band] at their own pace," says MTV Games senior VP of electronic games and music Paul DeGooyer to Billboard. "We're talking about a set of serious professional tools to allow people on the front line of writing and recording songs to completely control their destiny with respect to interactive products and then giving them direct access to the download store."
Rock Band Network will allow artists to submit songs to a community of developers who would ready the tracks for the game, or potentially create the note tracks themselves. Songs are then reviewed by members of the community, and Harmonix will post songs at the price that the original creators set. Rock Band Network was originally designed to help smaller bands expose themselves using the game, though MTV eventually saw the opportunity to expand the availability to major music labels as well.
"Once we flip on the infrastructure, we can go from a few dozen people capable of doing this work to hundreds of people or more," says Harmonix founder/CEO Alex Rigopulos. "We can ramp up by a factor of 10 or more the rate of production of content."
"If there's a really great song we love, we'd promote that, because that helps everybody," DeGooyer added. "We're also able to see what's selling well. If stuff has some heat on it, we may pick up on it . . . If Judas Priest decided to put their whole catalog in the Rock Band Network, we would promote the heck out of that."
The Rock Band Network is the latest demonstration of the fundamental difference between the way MTV has handled Rock Band compared to the way Activision has controlled the Guitar Hero franchise. While Activision has concentrated mostly on disc releases like Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica and the upcoming Guitar Hero: Van Halen, MTV views Rock Band as an online music distribution platform.
"Recorded music on its own no longer leads the charge for artists," noted DeGooyer. "It's now this aggregated value proposition of recorded music, touring, merch, branding, Web presence and now videogames . . . If we get this right, music creators will start to think about what they're releasing in terms of interactivity."
If you're wondering why Rock Band Network is coming first to Xbox 360, it's because of a close collaboration with Microsoft with their XNA game development platform and Creators Club online development community. This marks the first time the Creators Club and XNA have been used to help expand on an existing project. Microsoft has created a custom version of Creators Club for the Rock Band Network, which Harmonix will host separately from Microsoft.
"This is arguably the most complicated initiative Harmonix has ever tried to get off the ground, given the number of parties involved and the technical infrastructure involved," Rigopulos says.
The whole project is very much in a nascent stage and MTV is slowly ramping up the number of developers available in order to meet anticipated demand. Rock Band Network songs could also be potentially integrated with the regular Rock Band store, depending on how things go down.
"It's kind of a capitalistic petri dish," said DeGooyer. "I can envision a song coming into the Rock Band Network first, getting traction, picking up customers through online play and then being picked up by MTV's programming and showing up there. We've shown we can sell millions of songs in the Rock Band store. So it really does tie into a larger picture."
