E3 07: Rock Band to Feature Hundreds of Songs, New Downloads Every Week

Harmonix today announced that its upcoming music-based game Rock Band will include hundreds of songs, with entire albums available for purchase, as well as weekly downloadable singles.

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Harmonix today announced that its upcoming music-based game Rock Band will soon feature hundreds of songs for download, with entire albums available for purchase, as well as weekly downloadable singles.

The Who's "Who's Next" was confirmed as the first complete album. Singles confirmed in addition to last week's announced tracks were Metallica's "Enter Sandman", Rush's "Tom Sawyer," Ramones' "Rockaway Beach," STP's "Vaseline," Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly," Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," The Strokes' "Reptilia," and Queens of the Stone Age "Go With the Flow."

The company will form an advisory committee to select existing and upcoming music for inclusion in the game. The committee will be chaired by Steven "Little Steven" Van Zant, former actor from The Sopranos and a one-time guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    July 11, 2007 3:03 PM

    Holy crap.. whole albums?!

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      July 11, 2007 3:10 PM

      Yeah. Could this game sound any better?

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      July 11, 2007 3:14 PM

      well, i mean this is capitalism at its finest.... they took an existing product and improved on it to give people more of what they want. They basically gave the Guitar Hero franchise a real reason to worry now. wow.

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      July 11, 2007 3:17 PM

      i just hope they dont charge too much for this

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        July 11, 2007 3:22 PM

        exactly.

        it's awesome news. perked my ears, i want to geek-rock out, but i dont want to become a poor geek-rocker in the process.

        • reply
          July 11, 2007 3:25 PM

          Well on the upside they got to sit back and watch the GH2 DLC backlash, so presumably they learned some stuff from that

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            July 11, 2007 3:27 PM

            I'd put money on albums costing as much as a full album does on itunes. I don't have anything against that either.

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        July 11, 2007 3:58 PM

        Apparently $19.99 per album :(.

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          July 11, 2007 5:30 PM

          Whoa.

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          July 11, 2007 5:37 PM

          Fuck that's a rip off. :(

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            July 11, 2007 5:40 PM

            How so? It's about twice the iTunes price, sure, but you're also getting whatever programming work is involved in making it all come together (which I imagine is harder with 4 instruments)

            That's way better than the rate for the GH2 song packs.

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            July 11, 2007 5:43 PM

            It does require some effort to make up the fret boards for the song. then there's the QA to make sure it plays right. On top of that there's also the licensing fees for the music. The game is going to ship with 50+ songs so it's not like you need these additional tracks anyways.

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            July 11, 2007 5:43 PM

            oh, the olden days when people paid actual money for music. i regularly bought cds for $25 back in the day.

            but yeah, too high. maybe if you won an mp3 of the song after you beat it on hard?

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              July 11, 2007 5:46 PM

              That'd be a great feature. Not only are you buying it to play, you're buying it to listen elsewhere as well...

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          July 11, 2007 7:08 PM

          wtf that is cheap as hell

          you spend $15 on an album after tax anyways and don't get to play it on a video game

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          July 11, 2007 7:19 PM

          You got a source for that?

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          July 11, 2007 10:08 PM

          That's about right, considering it's 4 parts plus they seem to be lip syncing the models to the lyrics.

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          July 12, 2007 4:32 AM

          I think my main problem with the pricing is that it seems like it will always be way more than the average cost per song included with the game. Because when you look at it that way you are obviously being ripped off.

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            July 12, 2007 1:12 PM

            They have to break down and track the guitar, bass, drum, and vocal tracks, plus lipsync the models and animate the playing of the instruments. And then there is the licensing of the music itself. Of course it is going to cost money.

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              July 12, 2007 7:41 PM

              [deleted]

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                July 12, 2007 10:16 PM

                I don't know if they're going to cover all of these songs. I get the feeling that they're going to unravel the originals and create albums from that. I mean, hundreds of songs? That'd take forever.

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                July 14, 2007 2:35 PM

                I imagine most of this stuff is going to be based on original master tracks, not covers, but the other side of the coin there is that it leads to higher licensing fees.

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      July 11, 2007 3:27 PM

      That's the first thing I thought, but then after a few minutes I was wondering.. what's the odds they're going to do <your favourite album>? Maybe singles are better...

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