Wired: 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.
