Exploiting Rock Band Network "isn't easy"

By Robert Purchese Published 21 January, 2010

Says company offering to do it for cash.

Corbomite Games CEO Oded Sharon has told Eurogamer that the majority of bands will struggle to fulfil requirements for getting a song published on the Rock Band Network.

"The difficulty and level of experience required from authors to successfully create a fun and approved Rock Band song arrangement isn't easy. You've got to deal with authoring multiple instruments with multiple difficulties; deal with vocals, lighting, cameras, animations, sound mixing; and you have to do it well enough for it to pass the playtest and review process," said Sharon, who has set up a company to take care of these difficulties for musicians.

"Let's not forget that getting a song to Rock Band sometimes also involves other behind-the-scenes issues like legal and copyright ownership," he added. "A lot of bands are signed with labels or don't own all the rights for their songs. Or there are ego wars - I've had a band of five people that couldn't sign because their keyboard player refused as there's no playable part for a keyboard player [in Rock Band]."

"You need to have access to the recording tracks, and some artists simply don't, and cannot afford re-recording and remastering their songs. So it's much harder getting a song on Rock Band than it is getting on MySpace, or iTunes."

Israeli developer Corbomite claims the "difficult process" takes "dozens" of hours, and that costs go up or down depending on the complexity of a track. Radiohead's "Creep" is simple and therefore cheap, whereas Metallica's catalogue of songs, with "shredding and insane drumming", naturally costs more. The company will charge bands to take care of all this, although Sharon wouldn't tell Eurogamer how much.

Despite the hurdles, Corbomite is in full-throttle support of the Rock Band Network, and has created online portal Lehakat Rock (literally "Rock Band" in Hebrew) for bands and labels hoping to get their songs in-game. It's a pseudo-label in itself, only exclusively for Rock Band Network. It's also a reminder of how much impact music games have had.

Sharon recognises a "great opportunity". Millions of people own the game, he noted, and "are thirsty for more and more new content". To him that means the "sheer chance" of someone listening to a 30-second preview of a song and then buying it "is much higher than on MySpace or iTunes".

"I am 100 per cent positive that there's going to be some success stories where Rock Band helped facilitate an undiscovered artist's breakthrough. Bands that realise and understand that and are willing to [pay the] price have a better chance to be one of those."

"And we as a company, and the production service we offer, not only to Israeli bands and for any band worldwide, will help making it happen," he added. "We do it good and we do it fast."

The Rock Band Network entered open beta on Xbox 360 this week. Harmonix has said the ambitious service will experience technical difficulties - "Service Unavailable" right now, for instance - but asked for patience while it gets going.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (14) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • toythatkills #1 2 years ago

    He would say that.

  • Freek #2 2 years ago

    They always said this was a tool for professional musicians with acces to editing suites and the know how to use them, not something for amateurs.

    The rest of the copyright and ego issues are things that sound like they come into play in every aspect of the music industrie, not just making Rockband songs.

  • kangarootoo #3 2 years ago

    They are talking about extreme cases, and of course they are picking these extreme cases in order to push their business.

    This isn't 1995. Most bands that have recordings of their material have all the original stems AND probably had a hand in the mastering too. The copyright stuff is a bit of a red herring too, as that also won't apply in the majority of cases.

    Of course not everyone will find it easy (or even possible), but its not the mire this guy is suggesting. Especially not for any band that has at least member who is into digital recording and mixing (which some might argue should be part of the toolset of any working musician these days).
    Edited by 1 at 21/01/10 @ 13:13

  • schnide #4 2 years ago

    This is a great adver.. article! I meant article.

  • Notez #5 2 years ago

    Well, having played a lot of Rock Band and GH games I've thought of this myself (since there are lots of metal bands in Finland that would fit in quite well). I think part of the difficulty here is picking the right type of songs and making the charts fun to play in the game (while being accurate). That is the expertise you would be selling to bands in my opinion to ensure that the songs get in to RBN and that they get bought (in addition to the management that goes in - some of which could be optional depending on the band and contracts).

    I've no interest in making a business out of something like this, though, so it will be interesting to see how things work out for this company and whether they can keep their promises.

  • kangarootoo #6 2 years ago

    @Notez

    As I understand it, a lot of the difficulty comes not from the quality of the mark up, but from the volume of work involved in literally getting your tunes into a form the game can understand. Now I'm not going back on my saying that the process is not as complex as the quoted chap says, but it does still need technical audio skills and a lot of spare time.

    The audio needs to be formatted and mixed correctly, which may not be as straight forward as it sounds. If your band has one singer, one drummer, one bassist and one guitarist, AND you never overdub anything... then things will be relatively straight forward.

    However, if your recording is even remotely more complex than that, you won't be able to just drop in your original stems. You will need to decide what instruments the player will be controlling at any given time (if there are 3 guitar lines, the player may switch between them throughout the song) and remaster a new guitar line that includes everything the player is controlling at any given moment. You then of course need to remaster a mirror of that new line, so that everything the player it NOT controlling at any given time still appears in the mix.

    You will have to do that for the 3 instrument tracks.

    Than there is the markup. As you rightly say, quality is a factor here, but there is also a fair bit of sheer donkey work involved in marking up 3 instrument streams at 4 difficulty levels each.

    The vocals need transcribing, which means you need a good ear for pitch. You then need to write up all the lyrics (the easiest bit of the lot probably).

    There are then a bunch of things to do I know nothing about, to do with packaging everything up with animation cues, stage lighting scripts and all sorts of supporting game related stuff. I'll just imagine that as a big cloud with "Rocj band game things" written on it.

    I guess in summary what I am saying is that I don't agree with this guy that the barriers are unsurmountable and that you need to pay his company for everything. BUT, I am saying that a fair level of digital music knowledge is needed AND a reasonably large pile of hours will need to be invested.

    There are many bands out there that will have at least one member that is up to the task (or willing to learn), but it won't be a walk in the park to process even a few tracks (this chap is correct in his comparison to iTunes etc).

  • kangarootoo #7 2 years ago

    Sorry, that last post was probably a bit patronising and over explanatory.

    I got got going on a good ol' waffling session :)

  • TenMinJoe #8 2 years ago

    Don't apologise for your long post, kangarootoo, I thought it was pretty interesting.

  • insincere_dave #9 2 years ago

    When he says "any band worldwide", does he include Palestinian bands in that?
    Edited by 1 at 21/01/10 @ 17:11

  • schnide #10 2 years ago

    Took me a second there Dave - but spot on.

  • Notez #11 2 years ago

    @kangarootoo

    Yeah, those are all very good points and go well into more detail about the process of transforming a tune into a playable song in Rock Band. And I agree 100%, that many bands (at least together with their network of friends / colleagues) could do this without a 3rd party, if the whole RBN business starts to look appealing.

    But I mean still... _I'd_ pay to have it done by someone else, if the price was right, just because it's a god damn chore :)

  • kangarootoo #12 2 years ago

    @Notez

    "I'd_ pay to have it done by someone else, if the price was right, just because it's a god damn chore"

    That seems to be the main concern of people out there at the moment. If you are a known artist who can be sure of a reasonable volume of sales, its worth the risk. But if you are an unknown artist hoping to get some much needed exposure (which was part of the early pitch from Harmonix), the initial costs associated with getting your content into RB may just be too high unless you suffer doing the chore yourself.

    I'm not saying Harmonix are doing anything wrong though. This is a great idea, and it does give people a potentially excellent platform on which to sell their music and get it heard. It is just unfortunate that for now there are potentially prohibitive (in terms of cash, or time) costs involved. Its early days though, and if Harmonix are serious about this I expect they will be constantly refining the process and working on tools that make the job a more realistic one for more people.

  • brommers #13 2 years ago

    The toolset Harmonix provides is not overly complicated. transcribing the tracks is relatively easy and sound balancing should be on all bands agendas anyway. The hardest part i find is, as kangarootoo suggests is the animation and lighting cues as there's quite a lot of fiddling and testing. i've had a good few months to get my head round it but since it's only just gone to open beta there hasn't been much in the way of tutorials unless you were one of the lucky few who got into the closed beta. in summary, a little time and effort is all it takes and for those with the cash these sort of companys could do well for themselves. i may even enter into this buisness myself.

    edit: spelling and gramma
    Edited by 1 at 22/01/10 @ 06:56

  • barnard666 #14 2 years ago

    I have managed to get two songs in in one day, without ever having used any of the tools before - so no its isnt hard, even the animation stuff is pretty straight forward with the templates and stuff.

    However the peer people seem very very picky - So I doubt my songs will get through...the tools are very good fo the most part. Vocals are a pain in the ass though...and because my music is shouty I am hoping not worrying about notes will be fine...but I suspect those pesky forum folks will thing otherwise.