Music games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are simple enough in terms of gameplay, but testifying to the power of people’s passion for music, their impact has been staggering. At a time when purchasing recorded music has waned from a 90s peak, downloads for games are proving surprising growth, despite pundits predicting the segment would cool off. The talents of the Harmonix team attracted the collaboration of the download-averse surviving Beatles and family members. But most importantly, the popularity of these games has translated into renewed interest in learning to play real instruments. It’s no accident popular music chart sales are surging, or that you will now find a new selection of digital and acoustic (but serious) instruments at your local Best Buy, often located right next to the games section. (Even as a witness to this trend, I was surprised recently to pick up an extra KORG nanoKONTROL in the aisle next to Rock Band.) Heck, even sales of music notation software are growing.

I’m uncertain of the extent to which a game like Rock Band can be identified as the cause of these trends, but there’s no question that popular music making is on the rise, and games are part of the shift. Perhaps it’s a matter of games changing the way people feel about making music. After all, a lot of early music training is very much like a game: to learn a new instrument, you simplify the playing of that instrument into more basic exercises. Obviously, that helps develop chops, but it also boosts confidence, giving a music student a feel for what it’s like to play successfully. (And, let’s face it, even experienced pro players sometimes need to defeat anxiety.)

The dark side of all of this has been that the music itself has been limited to a narrow selection of top-of-the-charts hits and popular classic tracks. Rock Band Network doesn’t yet address the limited instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, voice), but it does open production to a new range of artists – and that, in turn, could be the beginning of much more to come. By allowing anyone to author and distribute tracks for a nominal subscription fee on Microsoft’s Xbox creation community, Rock Band Network is all about opening floodgates.

Having followed the story here on CDM since last year, I’m thrilled that the Rock Band Network store itself is now live. The results run the gamut from relatively big-name artists to more obscure contributions. (Phone giant T-Mobile will pony up some cash to highlight an “Artist of the Month” from the community, in the interest of shining a spotlight on lesser-known acts.) The only bad news is, while the store is international, the Rock Band Network isn’t immune from the music industry’s trouble crossing national borders; as our own Jaymis discovered to his dismay, countries like Australia are left out. I hope to talk to Harmonix and Microsoft about how they plan to make these kinds of efforts more global with time.

Games really are reshaping music. Despite their relatively simple gameplay, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises originated by developer Harmonix are stimulating interest in real music making. It’s no accident that you can walk into a Best Buy and, next to aisles of video games, find a growing selection of serious musical instruments and technology.

These titles are also stimulating interest in music and artists and producing a new distribution outlet, at a time when the distribution picture for music can seem bleak. But until now, that outlet has been limited to big acts, big tracks, and big deals with big labels. It has only promoted music you already know, not the discovery of new music. Rock Band Network could change all that.

We took a detailed look in August at how Rock Band Network worked technically, and how authoring a song for RBN could give you the same level of gameplay and choreographed graphics that the official Rock Band tracks get. But now here’s the big news: at long last, RBN is opening to the general public, starting with an open beta for artists and play-testers.

What it is: Rock Band Network is a new set of authoring tools (built around Reaper), a submission process (built around Microsoft’s Xbox 360 XNA Ceators Club), and an upcoming store to host indie tracks called the Rock Band Network Music Store.

What it costs: Rock Band Network membership is free, but you’ll need a $99/year XNA Creators’ Club Premium account to submit or test music.

There’s a lot of hype around the latest schemes for changing how artists get their music to fans, but not actually a whole lot of news. (It always seems to boil down to a website with some unpronounceable name.)

Well, this is news: Harmonix is opening up Rock Band to anyone who wants their music in it, and giving you the same sophistication of tools they use themselves. That’s a real game-changer – literally.

And I don’t mean just for the actual game Rock Band. Sure, Harmonix was the house that made music games a phenomenon in the US. They learned well from Japan’s Masaya Matsuura, perfected music games’ mechanics in Amplitude and Frequency, popularized the formula by launching Guitar Hero, then rocked collaboration with Rock Band before convincing the infamously-guarded Beatles to finally embrace digital tech. But the sad reality of game music in general is that it’s been a playing field for the old guard – it’s licensing deals with major labels to promote music you’ve already heard. It’s the top hits on the radio, redigested onto your game console. There’s commercial calculation behind even the tune that’s in the background while you’re paging through a screen in Madden. Harmonix has already changed some of the economics, and disrupted even what could be a hit, as kids discover classic metal for the first time or geeks grab music by Jonathan Coulton and Stephen Colbert. But that’s not quite the disruptive shift in game music so many people have expected.

I think Rock Band Network could be the first real sign of that shift.

Rock Band Network promises to be something really different. How?

• Anyone can get their music in the game. You don’t even need a label. You need a few (cheap) software tools, a computer, and some basic MIDI chops, and for a fraction of the cost of pressing a couple hundred CDs, any artist can get their work into Rock Band 2.
• It’s a real community-driven process. Your A&R people don’t have to shmooze with MTV. You don’t have to enter into some complex developer agreement with Microsoft or Sony. There isn’t even a shady, mysterious review process like the Apple iTunes App Store. Actual Rock Band fans will get to play your music and tell you that the animation needs fixing and the difficulty level needs to be fixed on the drums.
• You use Reaper – an actual music production tool for grown-ups. Harmonix could have given us some weird in-game tool they cobbled together themselves. Instead, they give us a special verison of Reaper, the brilliant, full-blown Digital Audio Workstation that inexplicably costs just US$60 but blows the pants off a lot of better-known tools. So you actually get to assemble your music the way Harmonix has been doing for years, with a real tool. Fortunately, the process has been made much easier and copiously documented, but it’s nice to be treated like adults for a change.
• If it works, Rock Band is just the beginning. It’s impossible to see into the future. RBN is a leap of faith both in the artists and the game fans, in terms of their taste and the amount of effort they’ll invest. But if it works, Rock Band Network could change the way people think about interactive user-created content, well beyond just furniture in the Sims or Little Big Planet.

Anyway, enough of the big picture – let’s talk details. I got to sit down with the Rock Band Network team from Harmonix high above Times Square in MTV’s offices this week to get a full-blown demo – including some seriously fun nerding out with composer/sound designer Caleb Epps, plus Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus and MTV’s games man, Paul DeGooyer. (In a sign that the big media world still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in this field, no one at the Viacom security desk had even heard of Harmonix.)

The team was extremely generous with technical details of Rock Band Network, and walked me through the process of how artists would get going with RBN. Here’s a first look at that process.

Gibson, the guitar company, has been on an utterly absurd campaign against music games, bringing lawsuits against the developers of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band and even against retailers. In the latest illustration of how screwed up patent law is, and just how over-litigious it has made technology in this country, the patent was based on a Gibson patent for a “System and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience.” Never mind that Gibson’s patent looks nothing like Guitar Hero, or that if interpreted that loosely, Gibson could theoretically sue any music software maker.

See my previous break-down of the patent and the twisted logic of the case:
Gibson Guitar to Guitar Hero Maker: We Own All Digital Musical Reality

And following development:
Gibson Guitar Loses Mind, Sues Entire Planet

Our friend Nilay Patel gets the scoop at Engadget that Gibson has lost its Guitar Hero case in California US District Court. Engadget also has a PDF of the decision:

Gibson loses Guitar Hero patent lawsuit, gets booed off stage

You can read juicy bits in the final ruling (PDF):

• Gibson’s own counsel withdrew from the case after the guitar maker refused their request for information. That’s right: Gibson wasn’t cooperating with their own lawyers. (Gibson later was represented by different counsel.)
• Gibson’s own corporate general counsel didn’t respond to requests from the court.
• Gibson started trying to force third-party Activision system providers to provide short-notice depositions, much to the dismay of the court and ACtivision, given Gibson’s own lack of cooperation.
• Gibson tried to use a YouTube video of a Guitar Hero hacker on the record, which the court found irrelevant (and, I think, laughable.)
• Gibson variously tried, unsuccessfully, legal gymnastics by which it could redefine musical instruments to enforce its ultimately irrelevant patent.

It’s official: we had heard rumblings that game maker Harmonix was about to announce something, and it’s here. It’s a collaboration directly with the Beatles to make something that isn’t Rock Band or Guitar Hero — something completely new. And something completely new is exactly what’s needed.

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, before being purchased by MTV/Viacom, game developer Harmonix were a very different creative house. Co-founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy were MIT friends whose first project was an application that let you play guitar with a joystick. (Sounds like a research project you might read about here.) Their interactive music games were influenced by the explosion of Japanese titles like PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania, to be sure. But part of what made FreQuency and Amplitude so important was that they offered more than just a simplified music experience. They were digitally-powered acid trips, with VJ-style video clips playing up buildings and surprisingly sophisticated interfaces that remixed the music as you played.

Make no mistake about it: Guitar Hero and Rock Band are brilliant titles with a fair dose of musical integrity in the way they abstract playing experiences for broader audiences. But there’s no question some of the original creativity — the sense that the game experience was unlike any other experience — is missing. And in this pumped-up HD age, in which surreal game experiences like intra-dimensional navigation in Portal or ambient floating cartoon paramecia in Spore, it’s hard to wonder if gamers who weren’t ready to snap up FreQuency a few years ago might be ready now.

So while rival Activision bakes a watered-down GarageBand-style app into another iteration of Guitar Hero, it’s intriguing, at least, that Harmonix is working with the Beatles. And they really are working with surviving Beatles and Beatles Significant Others: Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Olivia Harrison. (Okay, I’d like to see a special Yoko-inspired game on Xbox Live Arcade.) Most interesting, producer Giles Martin, heir to production legend Sir George Martin
and producer of the Love project with Cirque due Soleil, twice a Grammy winner, and the man behind The Beatles Anthology is involved, too. (See a great story on him in Sound on Sound.)

Let’s get straight to the point: for the band that made virtual acid trips mainstream decades ago, it’s time for a new, digital trip. (They do describe it as a “journey” through the Beatles’ work, after all.) I think the Beatles make a perfect choice. I can’t count the number of people I know in music composition who were addicted to Beatles records as kids — not the Beatles’ generation, but their offspring in the 80s and 90s.

And despite the intervening decades, Yellow Submarine still looks imaginative and bizarre. If gaming can do anything, it can take music we’ve heard a zillion times and make it new. It can make our regular experience, the reality around us feel a little different. Rock Band has proven to be a trojan horse: it’s literally driven up sales of real instruments. That’s proof that making something palatable to a mass market can help get them hooked on new kinds of experiences. Can a Beatles game feel less like interactive documentary or re-hashed Guitar Hero, and more like a groovy, retro journey into the strange imagination that turned a lot of us on to recording, music, visuals, and … uh … animations of strange creatures? I think so. Can’t wait to see what comes out.

PS — I want to play as George.