Rock Band Network Announced

Earlier today, Harmonix launched a site for their new Rock Band Network, http://creators.rockband.com. The Rock Band Network is the new tool that's going to be coming soon to Rock Band that will allow people to put their own music into the game.

The Rock Band Network, allows you to import different parts of a master track into separate software, running on your computer. You'll compile the tracks, and then you can chart the song for use in Rock Band. You'll also have control over stuff that's happening with your characters on stage, such as lighting and camera angles.

Now, a lot of you you may be wondering why we'd ever buy the official tracks ever again. If people can import music on their PC and chart it, we could have some Zeppelin on Rock Band once this thing is released, right? Wrong. Once somebody submits a track, it's looked at by Harmonix and checked for copyright infringement, among other stuff like playability issues and explicit language. Once a track passes Harmonix's good graces, then it gets put on the Rock Band Network store (Which appears to be in a separate menu from the main store), where you can charge anywhere between $.50 to $3 bucks.

This whole thing kind of reminds me of the music creator in Guitar Hero: World Tour. The system in World Tour allowed anybody to simply make midi-based tracks by pushing the buttons on the guitar, and hoping you could come out with something nice sounding, and playable. The difference between that system and the Rock Band Network is the barrier of entry. In order to get a song up on the Rock Band Network, you need this program called Reaper which costs $60, an XNA Creator's Club account that costs $99 a year, and another program called Magma (Which I haven't heard of and am hoping is provided for free.)

It looks like the Rock Band Network is targeting actual artists interested in putting stuff up on the store, and the high price won't be too much of a problem since they get 30% of the profit, this also keeps joke bands from uploading purposely bad songs because they know those songs won't sell. The Rock Band Network is scheduled to be released later this year, and a closed beta is going to be running from late July to mid August. Here's hoping the network is a success, and hey... who knows? Maybe I'll start a band and put something up myself.