The first rule of giving is that you need to make sure that the entity to which you’re giving is actually asking for support. In the wake of a devastating fire started during London’s rioting that wiped out a Sony warehouse, indie labels are indeed asking for such support, says a representative of fundraising efforts. Sony’s facility housed, under contract, massive stocks belonging to UK distributor PIAS, representing in some cases the majority or entirety of inventory of dozens of independent record labels. For smaller organizations, insurance funds may not arrive in time to continue day-to-day operation, at a time when small labels are often on the brink of being able to operate from one day to the next.

That’s the picture painted by Dan Salter, who tells CDM about the effort Label Love, which in the immediate aftermath of the fire was already communicating with labels and beginning organizing efforts. Along with Hannah Morgan, Dan is leading efforts to help keep the lights on at labels, and to communicate with the rest of us about what’s going on.

Note that this is not organized by PIAS; you can read their official statements by following the distributor’s official site. (PIAS say they are also working on cleanup and efforts to benefit labels, but no official statement has yet requested funds; they’ve mainly thus far clarified what’s happened and how they’re responding but stopped short of asking for donations, beyond volunteers to help cleanup the site.)

Updated: An official PIAS-organized fund is detailed below. In addition to providing loans to labels, a statement by PIAS and the Association for Independent Music suggests that the effort will also help coordinate third-party drives like Label Love.

If you’re not up to speed with what’s happened, see yesterday’s post:
150 Indie Labels Lose Stock as London Warehouse Burns; Details Emerging, Reports, and Benefits

CDM: First, who are you? Whom do you represent?

Dan: We’re not actually affiliated to PIAS, we are a little group of bloggers & music fans that wanted to do something to help.

Have you communicated directly with any labels? What have they told you, if so?

We’ve been in touch with a number of the labels. We write & run a number of music blogs so we already knew quite a few people involved but many more have got in touch since Monday. Some of the stories are heart wrenching, people’s whole livelihoods have been put at risk by what’s happened.

Insurance will presumably be distributed through SONY. That said, do we know if stocks were covered by insurance? I know that Sony had told PIAS they’re working on keeping stocks flowing.

We’re not totally clear on the insurance situation, as you say it might be a question for PIAS, but I do know that even if insurance is paid it may come too late for many of the smaller labels. These companies run on a day-to-day basis and this kind of break in their cash flow could be terminal.

What do we know at this point about losses that may be suffered by labels? How are they coping?

I’m not sure of the overall situation but we’ve been contacted by a number of labels who have lost pretty much everything & have said it’s very touch and go as to whether they can survive this.

Who made the decision to begin fundraising? Was this something that came up via fans of the labels, or that the labels asked for? What’s their response?

A lot of these people affected are people know personally and are friends with when we heard the news we responded by thinking about what we could offer as gig promoters and the idea of benefit shows was born.

How will funds be distributed once collected?

100% of money donated through PayPal will go to the labels affected. Money raised from the events less costs will also be distributed to the labels.

Ideally we want to distribute the money in relation to the percentage of stock lost by each label. If we can’t get the relevant information to do that then we will split it evenly between the PIAS clients.

If people want to help now, what are some ways they might do so? How can they give or volunteer?

They can either donate through our PayPal account, link is on http://cognitivedissonancerecords.com/labellove/ or if they want to offer their services they can mail us at labellovebenefit (at) gmail (dot) com

Some people were circulating the idea of buying downloads from their favorite labels who have been affected. Would you encourage that, as well?

It’s a great idea but we would encourage people to use independent sites like Rough Trade rather than iTunes or Amazon as they take a far smaller cut & the labels will benefit more.

And more broadly, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how everybody’s doing over there? Much appreciated!

To be frank, our minds are a little bit blown by the scale of the response to our suggestion. We initially envisaged doing a few small gigs around London, we never expected to be dealing with the sheer volume of offers & support that we have, it’s been amazing & humbling. Right now there’s only a couple of us at the core of this and we work full time as well but we’re hoping to have a team together soon to help us cope with what’s happened!

Updated: an official PIAS and Association of Independent Music (AIM) fund has been announced.

This morning, we are announcing the creation of a fund to help independents affected by the catastrophe. They will be able to draw upon the fund to help cover the interruption to their business and the cost of getting back onto their feet.

The fund is being provided by some of AIM’s larger member labels, other well wishers and from AIM’s reserves, and will be made available to affected smaller labels pro-rata to labels’ [PIAS] turnover this year, as required.



Funds will be made available as interest-free and security-free loans repayable within a year. 



Total initial funds available are £250,000.



[PIAS] are first and foremost focused on supporting their labels. AIM will be coordinating the fund, and also other offers of help in the form of promotions and benefit gigs.



Source: AIM, via their site musicindie.com.

The likes of Mute and Beggars Group also repeat what Label Love are arguing: that smaller and emerging labels may not yet be prepared to whether the immediate aftermath of these events without additional help. The fund would appear to help the cash flow problem.

Load up an Ableton set or mix samples, and you’re already in the domain of interactive music. With joysticks and arcade buttons and other controls, the blending of game and musical interface into generative compositional fusion is even clearer. It’s little wonder many electronic musicians take an interest in the nexus of gaming and music.

Any discussion of interactive music scores for games would be incomplete without Jonathan Mak. His self-produced title Everyday Shooter used classic top-down space combat as a musical experience: not only do sound effects in the game act as musical elements, but even the flow of the game itself fits into a generated song structure. Mak even imagined the title as an album. Playing through it, once you get into the groove of the action, the roles of gamer and listener merge into a single flow. (See video, at end.) Another nice feature – breaking from cliche, it’s a music game that employs guitar lacks in place of, say, a pounding trance soundtrack.

Now, Mak turns his attentions from space shooter to platformer, with SoundShapes, on the console Sony announced this week, the PlayStation Vita. It’s best to watch the video to see what’s going on. It’s just a taste; we’ll have to see the final title.

There’s more good news, too: on of our favorite artists, the inventive i am robot and proud, is the musical collaborator. And you can now look to Toronto as a hotbed of indie game action – take that, Montreal and New York – with i am robot and proud and the team behind iPad album-as-game-as-album Swords & Sworcery.

The effects of making ever game event musical can be cartoonish at times – though, perhaps in a game, that’s part of the pleasure and aesthetic. But in Mak’s best moments, it was as though he was composing with gameplay – canonical gameplay forms as a modern, digital parallel to musical forms like a sonata.

We’ll be watching. Thanks to Metehan Korkmazel for the tip!

Via GameSetWatch, who have some nice analysis. (One point of disagreement – they speculate this will be onstage “in the hands of at least one chiptunes performer.” I think that’s actually relatively unlikely; chip music artists continue to prefer dedicated music tools, not games. Laptop artists would occasionally feature an ElectroPlankton cameo. But I’ve been fiddling with some Processing sketches that try to make game interfaces for music. It’s fun, if really hard; I’ll keep trying. Seems a good airport layover project.)

Previously on CDM:
Portal 2′s Musical World, Available Free, in Non-Adaptive Form “For Testing” [ Also makes use of interactive musical accompaniment ]

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery

Game makers and (particularly Mac) utility developers have joined forces to do various bundles of their software. I have to say, I generally like the model – particularly the fantastic Humble Bundle of indie games. That collection not only encouraged people to try adventurous (often experimental) independent game titles, but gives some of the proceeds to relevant charities. Linux users have been buying up the bundles disproportionately, contrary to the idea that they won’t spend money on software, and some of the developers even set a goal to earn enough money to open source their tools. (The open source software had a tangible benefit for gamers, too: it improved compatibility and performance on Mac and Windows.)

If you’re an independent music developer wondering how to make it work with an increasingly-commoditized, crowded marketplace, it could be worth investigating.

The Indie Dev Collective is one such effort for music developers. The model is a bit different: you buy music titles a la carte, not in one giant bundle. That means you only get what you really need, though, and titles still get some steep discounts, some up to 50-65% more. They’ve found a really talented group of developers, as well: H.G.Fortune, whiteLABEL, UGO Audio, Xoxos, ManyTone Music, Nuclues SoundLab, and others are participating. There are synths, effects, and soundware all on offer (and even one host).

Some stand-outs for me: IMEA Sequencer, pictured at top, is a 64-bit-ready Windows sequencer designed for live performance, complete with useful modules and VST compatibility. It looks fantastic – and it’s about time people found some alternatives; I love Ableton Live, but it’s boring if it’s the only thing you ever see onstage.

In effects, I like Amboea, a powerful set of stereo delay lines with “algorithmic crossfading.” Yeah, you could more or less finish an entire track with this one if you wanted.

There are a number of deep synths and drum machines, the most interesting I think being the M-theory physical modeling – hybrid instrument, bundled here with arpeggiators and MIDI tools. There’s also a fascinating-looking strumming plug-in bundled with multi-band effects and filtering, Mildon’s Strummer 2 and M4GIQ. Both those instruments are found here:
MIDI Effects

Windows users will find many, many more options than Mac owners, though Mac fans will find some good plug-in choices and plenty of soundware. (And they might have some goodies to use on a dual-boot system.)

All the tools here:
http://www.indiedevcollective.net/index.php

Sale ends May 23, or 23 May if you live in civilization. So, what do you think? Finding any good deals here? Favorite tools? And how could this model work elsewhere?

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.

For those countries covered, though, you can now enjoy the store as both an artist and listener (or make that “player”). Starting on launch day last week, of Montreal, The Shins, The Hold Steady, Steven Vai, and geek God Jonathan Coulton were onboard. (“The Future Soon,” anyone?) I’m pleased that among other artists, we have Flight of the Conchords to look forward to.

But I will say, whether you appreciate these games or not, there are promising signs for the music business here, without question. Harmonix’s founders began work with experimental musical interface research, as with many of the readers of this site. Oddly enough, though, what they found was by some measure an entirely new industry.

By the numbers:

• Rock Band Network launches with over 100 songs, out of a private beta; expect far more.
• Artists choose pricing tiers and get a 30% royalty (high for this kind of royalty, at least for a typical indie artist).
• 1,100 tracks are currently available on Rock Band, prior to the many, many more expected on RBN.
• Some 4,300 users have registered on RBN to contribute tracks and/or perform peer review. That’s significant growth for Microsoft’s XNA community, and it’s prior to a wider launch that will be an order of magnitude bigger.

Harmonix info:
How to Submit a Song; scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to Become a Peer Reviewer (aka playtester)

I’ll see the Harmonix team this week at GDC; I’m looking forward to it. Let me know if you have questions for them. It is a reminder, though, of why I’m glad to spend my travel time in March at the Game Developer Conference even in place of South by Southwest. I think a lot of our future may be at the former as much as the latter. (Well, and if not, I still get to geek out with discussions of adaptive music engines.)

If this stuff does interest you, don’t miss our previous, exhaustive Q&A’s with Harmonix (thanks to the folks there for being so forthcoming):
Inside the Rock Band Network, as Harmonix Gives Interactive Music its Game-Changer
Your Band in Rock Band: Rock Band Network Beta Opens, Q&A with Harmonix

The independent game Osmos won our hearts in 2009, with transcendent, meditative gameplay built on simulated particle physics, starting as a floating wonderland and ending with some deliciously punishing difficulty. But it’s the soundtrack that sealed the deal: ambient-tinged work by artists like Gas 0095, Julien Neto, Loscil, and High Skies helped us imagine an unseen, microscopic (or perhaps macroscopic) world. Their sonic craft is a great example of what digital music can be.

Now, I’m pleased to offer a lot of that music for your listening pleasure, for free. It’s one of the rare game soundtracks you’d want to hear even after having heard it on repeat while solving some of the title’s trickier puzzles. A huge thanks to the artists, whose generosity made this compilation possible – check out their work if you haven’t already.

The release is overdue, but it comes at a good time. By the end of last year, Osmos migrated from its initial, Windows-only release to Mac, too. Owners of multitouch PCs have been treated to a multitouch version on Games for Windows Live. (I’m still working on loaning a multitouch laptop; stay tuned.)

The most recent news, as seen on Synthtopia and the Microscopics blog: an iPhone version of Osmos is coming soon.

If you’ve already gotten the game but got stuck on Epicycles (ahem), we have a solution for that, too – see the recently-released video from the game developers, who must have heard your pain. (Man, in my day…)

We have two formats for listening:
MP3 for download
M4A extended podcast with visuals and chapter markers
(sadly, there seems not to be an open format for doing this, and one of the only creation tools is GarageBand – I’d love to hear alternatives)

Featured music:
Vincent et Tristan – Osmos Theme (two excerpts)
Gas 0095 – Discovery
Loscil – Lucy Dub
Loscil – Roschach
Loscil – Sickbay
High Skies – The Shape of Things to Come
Julien Neto – From Cover to Cover
Julien Neto – Farewell

And yes, that includes the most-definitely-unreleased samples by Vincent et Tristan, which are short but quite beautiful.

If you want still more music, the fantastic High Skies EP Sounds of the Earth is free for Osmos customers.

More from Mat / Microscopics, including an improved, higher-quality papercraft Minimoog:

I’ve just added a prize draw to win the Minimoog and the Gas 0095 collection on my blog for the Gas 0095 15 year anniversary
http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2010/gas-0095-15-year-anniversary-collection-giveaway/
And I have a Gas 0095 Q&A and have set up a page for people to submit any questions (also via Facebook and our contact page).
http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2010/gas-0095-questions-for-answers/

I’ve also added a new short video of a microscopic journey into the Gas 0095 album art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYM1_9-HzSI&hd=1

Finally, if you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss our interview with the creators of the game; it offers inspiration that is musical as well as gaming- and design-related.

Completing F3C-3 (Epicycles 3) from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

One Big Game is a charity assembled by game developers to raise money for children’s organizations. Musical games look to figure prominently in the series. Design legend Masaya Matsuura (PaRappa the Rapper, Vib-Ribbon), father of rhythm games and without whom there likely would be no Rock Band or Guitar Hero, has signed. And the first title out, from Zoë Mode, is musical in nature, too, in a game called “Chime.”

Chime is an elegantly-designed game and a lovely way to unwind, particularly with Philip Glass’ gorgeous “Brazil” in the track list. (“Brazil” has Glass’ usual musical furniture, but the cut, taken from the Aguas da Amazonia album, is executed by the extraordinary Uakti ensemble and takes on a new set of timbres.) One relevance to Create Digital Music – it’s not a bad way to take a break after a production and/or programming stint. The game is 500 Microsoft Points for Xbox Live, the lion’s share of which goes to children’s charities.

Fun as it is, Chime also reveals some of the limitations of musical gameplay; whether or not that’s a fault is really up to the user/gamer. The gameplay is almost a direct homage to Lumines, Tetsuya Mizuguchi‘s puzzle game. As with Lumines, you place interlocking blocks into patterns, with the basic mechanics derived from Tetris. Chime is actually slightly simpler; there’s no color matching involved, only the creation of matching “quads” – areas of the grid 3×3. The more of the space you manage to fill up, the higher your score, which is oddly satisfying. (Sure, other animals have survival instincts and stuff like that imprinted in our brain; humans seem to be basically obsessive-compulsive as a species. Great.)

How is this a “music game” and not just a variant of Tetris? Well, again borrowing (liberally) from Lumines, Chime has a playback “wiper” that scrolls across the screen from left to right. In fact, it’s not so much that Chimes or Lumines are music games as it is that digital musical interfaces in general tend to use left-to-right, linear, step-sequencing grids. The tracks are all pre-composed, whether Glass or Moby, so the blocks themselves just add little musical “flairs,” kept in time to the music.

And that brings us to the limitation: it’s funny to me that these games tend to do so little musically. Lumines, at least, provides satisfying rhythmic cues that align with gameplay. Chime is so subtle, you’re barely aware that the blocks impact the music at all. Aesthetically, that works well: the addition of music feels seamless, focusing the user on gameplay – and this is a game.

But perhaps it’s not really game design that’s at fault. Music lacks a strong generative tradition, and musical interfaces are only now taking baby steps into anything that looks different from conventional interfaces. Indeed, it seems what’s urgently needed is for people who work on interaction design and people who work on music to start to work across disciplines. In fact, I’m seeing far more innovation with game interfaces than musical interfaces.

Of course, that’ll require a lot of programming time. And that means you’ll need a break. And for a break, I still recommend Chime. Sure, the musical selections are a bit oddly matched, with Lemon Jelly’s Fred Deakin, Moby, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, Markus Schulz, and … Philip Glass. But it’s still quite fun. And you can say you’re doing it for the kids.

http://www.chimegame.com/

The one thing you probably aren’t thinking while watching the Grammys is “wow, look at this amazing showcase for independent music.” (Last night, I expect you were thinking something more along the lines of, “I was supposed to get 3D glasses for this? Augh! I’m dizzy! Switch it off!”)

But keep score, and independent artists and labels are a huge part of the Grammy Award-winning roster. And with indies invading even the most mainstream of music events, that’s a strong indication of how big a part of the industry independent music is becoming. (Side note: yes, I’m aware that the definition of “indie” is murky at best. But looking at the broad trend, there’s still something here. There’s a difference between an artist self-releasing and being on RCA; examples below. In short, this may not be what most of us would call “indie,” but it’s a big shift away from the traditional role of the “major.”)

Want an example? How about “Album of the Year” Taylor Swift’s Fearless? And it’s not incidental that Taylor Swift thanked said label for allowing her to write all her own songs. (My own personal fandom of Taylor Swift ranks up there somewhere with Kanye West’s, but I think that’s worth noting.)

One of the groups keeping score at the Grammy Awards is A2IM, a not-for-profit that represents the independent music community. This year, says A2IM, some 43 awards can be considered “indie,” including the categories Pop, Rock, Alternative, Country, New Age, Jazz, Gospel, Tropical Latin, Tejano, Norteno, Bando, Americana, Bluegrass, Blues, Folk, Hawaiian, Native American, Zydeco/Cajun, World, Spoken Word, Comedy, Surround Sound, & Classical genres, and also scored for Best Recording Package.

Artists (aside from Taylor Swift) include PHOENIX, Steve Earle, and one of my long-time personal favorites, Buckwheat Zydeco. Looking over the list, I see quite a few indie selections. Rounder Records alone won Best Pop Instrumental Performance (Béla Fleck), Best Bluegrass Album (winner Steve Martin — yes, that Steve Martin — and nominee Rhonda Vincent), and two nominations for a Woody Guthrie re-issue. Rounder last year won best album of 2009 for “Raising Sand.”

Electronic music gets just one category, and that was won by Lady Gaga. (Interscope, her label, is part of Universal so, erm, definitely not indie.) But nominee The Crystal Method went their own way with Divided by Night, releasing on their own Tiny E Records. When I talked to the duo in the spring, they talked about how important it was to focus on their own creative muse rather than the demands of a major label.

Being an independent artist isn’t necessarily the right decision for every artist. Imogen Heap is signed to RCA. But being an artist who’s independently-minded, too, can be important.

I think it’s a really powerful statement that Imogen Heap won a Grammy for “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical” for her record Ellipse. It’s rare for artists engineering their own albums to win, period, and this is a profoundly dude-dominated category, to boot. Whoever you’re signed to, you know it’s the artists who are motivated who can achieve the most. Imogen Heap’s savvy use of Twitter, her connection with her fans, and her ability to manage her own career must make the folks at RCA and Megaphonic Records very, very happy. And incidentally, even this demonstrates the way the majors themselves have changed: a lot of the majors have gone to small imprints that operate with the agility of the indie labels.

Discussion of Imogen Heap’s win on her fan forums

It’s a new world out there – even if we still have those dorky 3D glasses from the 50s.

The full list:
http://www.grammy.com/nominees

*Disclaimer: I can’t actually stand the Grammys, generally speaking. But that’s why I looked for something interesting to pull out of it, which this, to me, was. It means even at the awards ceremony that’s the greatest expression of major label power, major label power is waning. I’m sure I won’t be misunderstood, of course, that each commenter will read with great care all the nuances of what I’m saying.

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.

What you’ll need: To author titles, you need an Xbox 360, a copy of the Reaper software, a set of free plug-ins for Reaper for RBN, the XNA account, and either a Windows PC or Mac. (You’ll need Windows, either virtualized or on another machine, in order to actually load the tracks for testing, but you can author on either; see below for more.)

What it gets you (as an artist): If you make it through the peer-reviewed submission process, you stand to set your own pricing and receive 30% royalties (retail, excluding tax) on everything you sell.

What it gets you (as a peer reviewer): With the XNA Creators’ Club membership, you can play as many tracks as you want without any additional charge, in exchange for your feedback. Tired: squeezing into sweaty, overcrowded bars at CMJ and South by Southwest to hear new acts. Wired: Scouting for new acts on your cough with your Xbox 360. And that could make a nice community of music, depending on how this evolves.

Where the tracks will be distributed: Anyone with a copy of Rock Band 2 (and presumably future versions of Rock Band) can play your tracks. Releases will initially debut on the Xbox 360 store for 30 days. A “selection” of tracks will also appear on the PS3 and Wii stores after that. (The approved songs will stay on the RBN Store on Xbox 360, regardless.)

When does all of this happen? The open beta launches today for peer reviewers and artists. The store is due, um, “real soon now.” (No specific date yet.) The game itself is ready to go, at least on Xbox 360: a patch introduced way back in September added the ability to play RBN tracks.

CDM Talks to Harmonix

John Drake, Program Manager for Rock Band Network, took some time out to answer my questions on the eve of launch.

CDM: What will the Rock Band Network Store look like? Where will you get access to it? Will it be a similar store on the PS3 and Wii?

John: The RBN store will run in parallel to the existing Harmonix DLC store, and will be in the same menu location within Rock Band 2. The RBN store has more info about each song than our existing DLC store does, and it has more ways to discover new music: you can search by subgenre, album, country of origin, record label, even the author of the song.

The PS3 store will be very similar to the Xbox 360 store. Details of the Wii RBN presence are still being worked out.

Ed. note: It’s especially nice to see the RBN store on equal footing. I had high hopes for the XNA-produced games on Xbox Live, but those titles aren’t displayed or listed in exactly the same way, which I think has hurt the initiative a bit.

CDM: In addition to the XNA Premium subscription, you still need Windows to support testing your own tracks, yes? Do you need a Windows PC to be a playtester?

John: You need to run Windows in order to transfer song files to the Xbox 360, because we use Games for Windows Live to manage the transfer. We have informally tested running Windows on a Mac on a number of virtual machines, as well as BootCamp, and most of them work perfectly for transferring files.

Ed.: I can add, a number of the Harmonix guys are Mac fans, so you can believe they tried the virtualization approach!

CDM: Since we last talked, there has been a private beta. Were there any additional improvements / changes since our August conversation? What kind of feedback have you gotten?

John: The closed beta has been absolutely invaluable to help us shape the experience for the new members just now joining the program. We’ve cleaned up and organized the documents section of the website, added a great deal of new information, clarified policies for submitting songs, and generally made sure that the pipeline is running smoothly. None of the major processes are any different than initially designed, but we have changed a million small details to make it better.

It’s important to note that the members that have been in the beta have been absolutely extraordinary: patient, intelligent, hard working, thoughtful, and helpful to each other as they worked through the inevitable issues that cropped up as we readied the site for launch.

CDM: Have any currently-available tracks come through the private beta process? (Jonathan Coulton’s?)

John: We currently have nearly 40 approved tracks, including tracks by the inimitable JoCo, and a bunch more up for playtesting and peer review. We’re expecting even more great content to go up for testing in the next few days, and we’re excited for people to join our playtesting ranks to get even more songs through the pipeline!

CDM: I see TuneCore is offering track preparation services. Have you seen similar offerings begin to appear? (For some of us, doing the authoring may actually be satisfying – we’re weird that way!)

John: There’s a great variety of services cropping up from authoring houses offering with different programs to create songs for bands. These range from straight, up-front fee structures to a $0 down, pay us out of your royalties deal. It’s really exciting to see how different groups are responding!

*PS, I’m with you on the satisfaction of authoring. I’ve been working with my band to put our whole last and current record (17 songs in total) up for RBN. It’s a lot of work, but it’s super rewarding to get involved in the process! And it’s really doable if you’re used to making music as a passion!

CDM: Outside RBN, are these tools beginning to be used on Harmonix’s own tracks? (I believe that was in the works when we last spoke.)

John: It was always the intention that the tools we developed for the Rock Band Network would be integrated internally at Harmonix and that has begun to happen. With the industry leading amount of content we produce (over 1000 songs and counting) anything that makes the job of our unparalleled Audio Team easier is welcome, and in most cases the Rock Band specific tools were built by members of the Audio Team themselves!

CDM: Okay, enough of the nit-picky details… what’s it mean for you that you finally get to take this to public beta? Now with a few months more perspective on it, what do you think this will mean for musicians to get on this platform, revenue aside?

John: As our Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus said about Rock Band Network, “It completes me.” We’re already thrilled with the community working within RBN and we’re hopeful to see a lot more great content and enthusiastic playtesters signing up at Creators.RockBand.com now that we’re open!

Additionally, we’re really proud of our teams here at Harmonix and MTV Games, who have designed a really smart way of getting great music into the hands of fans. Empowering musical groups of all sizes and genres to be able to post their own content for sale is really a dream come true at Harmonix. Adding the great variety of music for our passionate fanbase only makes it that much sweeter. We’ll be even more excited when the store turns on and those first tracks sell!

Go Check it Out

I hope to help document both how artists are using RBN and the technical process for doing this yourself over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can hop on the beta yourself if you’re interested:

How to submit a song: http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Website
Scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to become a peer reviewer?
http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Playtest_Process

And yes, I still want to see an Amplitude/Frequency Network that’s friendly to electronic music, minus drums + guitar. I think Harmonix knows a few of us feel that way.

Jonathan Coulton on Rock Band Network, from the awesome PAX.

PAX ’09 Rock Band Network Panel #3 from Harmonix on Vimeo.

Everything you need:
http://Creators.RockBand.com

Video interview by G4:

For a truly unique and very much last-minute gift for anyone you know, look to CDM’s favorite game of year, the gorgeous, blood pressure-lowering title for Windows and – at long last – Mac. I may personally identify a little too much with the abstract protagonist of this game, as my holiday activities could well be described as floating around the universe, sucking particles into my gravity well as I grow in size. But whether or not I feel literally like an expanding bubble of matter, one of my favorite experiences this year was entering this ingenious physics-based game. It fuses visuals with a sparkling minimal electronic soundtrack by some favorite artists, from Gas to Loscil, and could be a perfect surprise hard drive stuffer for a Mac or Windows user – even if they’d be puzzled by, say, a sophisticated virtual analog instrument.

$10, Mac and Windows, instant download.

Osmos @ Hemisphere Games

I’m not doing this as an advertisement, either – I’m buying it and placing it on the hard drive of someone dear to me, who I’m fairly certain isn’t reading this blog and to whose laptop I have easy access.

Lastly, to help celebrate the holidays, we’ll have treats in the form of free downloads and tips leading from this weekend into the New Year. Among them, I’m pleased to offer the exclusive official Osmos soundtrack as a free CDM Sounds podcast. (I hoped to have that edited in time for today, but expect it by Monday. And yes, it’s the rare soundtrack that you’ll still want to hear after the game is over.)

Best gift I could have received: http://createdigitalmotion.com is back after a screw-up with our domain. It won’t happen again, and we’ll make it up to our visualist readers with extra content starting next week.

Thanks, everyone, and enjoy the season. Winter is, after all, a great time to bunker in and make music.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. We get to enjoy the sounds and sights made by chips, independent games, and Novation Launchpad-controlled Sega Mega Drives. Blip Fest hits NYC this week in a celebration of vintage and lo-fi chips and the wonderful, blippy music they produce. To get things started right on Wednesday night, we have a special edition of Handmade Music, the DIY music party/science fair/noisy racket series, in a special location — the opening of Babycastles, a new, permanent home for independent games. (Think “indie arcade,” an idea I hope spreads worldwide.)

If you’re in the area, come check out some terrific independent games, meet artists, see in person the inventions of Australia’s Little Scale, and more. OPEN CALL FOR STUFF: Visiting Blip artists and NYC-area hackers, if you’ve got a visual or musical creation related to gaming or chip music, we’d love to have you show-and-tell and make some noise with it; this is, as always, an open potluck for the things you make. (Bring cables and, if you can, portable amplification/headphones.) Everyone, if you can make it out a little early, we’ll have a “secret” workshop with Loud Objects to solder a chip music toy, even if you’re a beginner. (Sign up below; we’ll need a very small fee for parts.)

Wherever you are, Sebastian Tomczak from South Australia, aka Little Scale, is a sound artist you really don’t want to miss. For a long list of awesome, look no further than his blog, for Game Boys tuned like Japanese kotos, Max patch sequencers to download, and Game Boy Advance albums. He’s promised to bring his performance-ready Sega MegaDrive and Atari 2600 jr, a 2600 MIDI interface, and the Sega sounds controlled by new tech, the Novation Launchpad, as pictured in the video at top.

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/

Sign up for the “secret” chip music toy soldering workshop with Loud Objects:

Signup for semi-secret workshop

Facebook event RSVP

More on the event / map:

The location is in the Bushwick neighborhood. For those of you in from out of town, Google Maps can give you transit directions and time estimates; it’s a pretty easy trip from Manhattan, and we’ll head back there afterward to catch Blip’s open mic night. Official event info:

Babycastles Arcade Kickoff Party feat. Handmade Chiptunes Night

Free, Wednesday, December 16th, 6:00PM – 8:30PM

Babycastles teams up with Handmade Music Night for the inaugural opening of a permanent indie games arcade in Brooklyn.

915 Wyckoff Street, L to Halsey or M to Myrtle / Wyckoff. (map below)

This opening celebrates Adam Atomic’s Canabalt (NYC), Ivan Safrin’s Owl Country (NYC), Tristan Perich’s KillJet (NYC), and Kyle Purver’s Jottobots (NY), which will be playable all night and throughout December. Cardboard lectures by the game developers! High Score Chalkboard Dress by Lara Grant! Chiptunes performance and workshop by little-scale (AU)! Show up extra early for a secret chipmusic toy soldering workshop by the Loud Objects.

Part of an official Blip Festival Pre-Party – 10% discount on Blip Festival tickets available, and a group hug ride to the Tank afterwards!

View Larger Map

Babycastles

Babycastles, New York’s first independent games arcade, is named after bite-size portugese cakes in Japan. As a new function of a legendary all-ages venue for Brooklyn music and other local diy-culture, Babycastles is a wall of six lovingly decorated arcade cabinets that offers a physical place to play games made by amateur and independent game developers. The arcade is open four or five nights a week, during every show at the Silent Barn. The venue throws an opening party every few weeks for a new collection of arcade games, with the game developers present, music, drinks, and plenty of opportunity to get together and love games.

Handmade Music Night

Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance, this is an informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. The evening is a gathering of inventors of new instruments & music technology. Featuring circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. And it’s open to everyone from hard-core hackers & newcomers to music lovers who want to learn about the DIY music scene.