MTV Archive

In an effort to make more content available to consumers MTV and Harmonix announced plans to launch the Rock Band Network later this year. A service that could be a game changer for the popular music rhythm series.

The service itself is pretty straight forward. Artists or labels can submit their music in a couple of different ways. They can either “hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house” or send their submissions to “a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers.”

The service is intended to help independant artists expose their music to a larger fan base that other wise would have been out of reach. But the service will have positive implications far passed that.

Currently Harmonix can only push out 10 new songs a day to be made available as DLC at the Rock Band store. If you take that bottleneck out of the equation the amount of content that will be available for download would be exponentially greater. Great for fans as well as artists. A win win for everyone.

Songs submitted will be priced by the artist themselves within a range of $0.50 to $3.00 per song. The artists would then get a 30% cut in any sales made of those tracks. Also artists will finally have total control over the note charts for their songs. Something that wasn’t possible in the past.

I wonder if Activision and Guitar Hero have anything up their sleeves to compete with this service? Can their business model selling expansion discs like Guitar Hero: Van Halen hold up when consumers will have a more convenient and cheaper alternative with their competitor. We’ll have to wait and see.

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