At a private event in New York, MTV's Harmonix division recently demonstrated Rock Band Network, an addition to the popular videogame series that will soon let artists and labels of any stripe convert their songs into Rock Band files. If the community approves of them, the songs will go on sale in the Rock Band Network Music Store after it launches in November (open beta in October), so that other gamers can rock through their creations.
Until now, Rock Band's catalog has been somewhat restrictive compared to regular music stores, because encoding a song so that people can play along with each part on a plastic instrument requires lots of legal paperwork and heavy lifting by Harmonix' team of composers and sound designers. By opening up the tool set to the world, and channeling its creations through a community to hone the songs for release, Rock Band Network will harness the crowd to increase, vastly, the number of songs you can play in Rock Band.
"This will give gamers access to way more content," said Rock Band Network senior producer Matthew Nordhaus. "We've been pushing content since the launch, and it's really tiring."
Harmonix's demonstration of the system, which will be formally announced in mid-September, was impressive although we were somewhat disappointed that the system does not go all the way by allowing bands to crowdsource the creation of their gameplay files to the public, with the band or label merely approving and finalizing the best one. Instead, only someone who owns the sound recording and publishing rights to a song — or has permission from those rights holders — can add it to the system.
Regardless, this program should lead to an explosion of new content for the game — especially in previously under-explored genres like hip-hop, country and instrumental music, according to Harmonix, which is already testing the system in a closed beta.
When Rock Band Network launches in November, only Xbox 360 users will be able to buy these songs — for $1, $2 or $3 depending on how the submitter prices them, with 30 percent of revenue going to the submitter and the rest going to Viacom/MTV/Harmonix and Microsoft. And only Xbox 360 users will be able to submit songs to the store, Harmonix says, because the intricate system for letting creators audition their songs and evaluate each others' work runs on Microsoft's XNA Creators Club.
The company is working on a Sony PlayStation version (no release date), but that will only contain a subset of what's available on Xbox 360 (Harmonix will have to port the songs over to the PlayStation platform, and they're not going to port all of them). As for Nintendo Wii owners, they're out of luck as far as these new songs are concerned because Nintendo offers no mechanism for letting developers insert content into a game. "We're still trying to figure out how to get them there," explained Nordhaus.
If you play Rock Band on a supported console, you'll be able to buy songs added by the community in the Rock Band Network Store, which will offer over 100 subgenres and searching by artist, song title, country, decade, difficulty, label, language or submitter. Harmonix hopes certain submitters will gain notoriety among gamers, the way producers do in the music business. You can also browse Harmonix' picks or have the system choose a random song, while preview mode lets you play any selection for up to 30 seconds or 35 percent of the song, after which you can delete or purchase it.
According to Harmonix, anyone with a modicum of experience with multitrack recording software should be able to turn a song into a Rock Band track in about two days, using WAV files of each track in the song (drums, bass, guitar and just one vocal track, because harmonies are too complicated for the system to handle). It also requires a membership in the creator community — $100 for a year, $50 for four months, whether you want to add songs to the store or just critique other peoples' songs, on difficulty, note placement and so on. A song must be approved by eight community members before it goes into the store.
You can use any software to create the requisite audio and MIDI tracks, but it will be way easier with the custom authoring software — a special version of Reaper, developed by Justin Frankel — the same guy responsible for Winamp, Gnutella, Ninjam and too much other stuff to mention here. (Can it be that Rock Band co-founder Eran Egozy got the idea to use Reaper from this reporter? I believe we discussed the program following the musical robot competition we judged together last year.)
The Reaper plug-in (Mac or PC) costs $60 for an individual or $240 for a commercial license, includes tools for automatic drumbeat and lyric creation, and lets you encode on-stage explosions as MIDI events. Once a developer has the tracks ready to go, they run them through Harmonix's free, Windows-only Magma software, which can automate camera angles, lip syncing and drum animations or let developers set those things themselves. Magma then compresses the audio to the open source Ogg Vorbis format and sends it to a nearby Xbox 360 for testing. Finally, the program uploads the song to the community for peer review and possible inclusion in the store.
Here are some early screenshots from Rock Band Network, Reaper and Magma:
See Also:
- The Beatles: Rock Band Set for September 9, Includes Beatles-Style Guitars
- We May Have Already Reached Peak Guitar Hero
- 10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music
- The Beatles Make the Leap to Rock Band
- How Beatles Rock Band's Vocal Harmonies Work
- Behind the Scenes of The Beatles: Rock Band
- Beatles Rock Band 'Value Edition': $160
- Hands-On: Beatles Rock Band's Reward System, Drum Trainer
