Rock Band Network

» see creators.rockband.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Rock Band Network sold in nine countries and Turkey was not one of them. Neither were most countries. The list ran United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Singapore, which is where the storefront worked, and even inside that list you needed a plastic guitar that had never been a category in Turkish retail. So this one is read rather than remembered.

What Harmonix built with Microsoft, live on 4 March 2010 after a closed beta the previous July and an open beta on 19 January, was a way for a band to put its own song into Rock Band without asking anyone's permission. You bought an XNA Creators Club license, opened the track in REAPER with a set of Harmonix tools bolted on, and placed every note for every instrument by hand. A compiler called Magma turned that into a playable song file. Other authors then reviewed it in a public queue, checking that the charting was honest and that you owned what you had uploaded.

Then it went on sale for one to three dollars, and the artist kept thirty percent of what it made. Over a hundred songs were there on the first day, four hundred by May 2010, five hundred by August with roughly three new ones landing every day. The final count passed two thousand.

The economics were never soft. Authoring a track well was estimated at around five hundred dollars a minute of music if you paid somebody to do it, against a dollar a sale at thirty percent. Almost nobody made that back. People did it anyway, for four years, because it was the only door into a game that had otherwise been a licensing negotiation between large companies.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the authoring pipeline ~

The peer review was the interesting part and the reason the catalog held up. A submitted song sat in a queue where other authors played it and voted, and the criteria were not taste. They were whether the chart matched the recording, whether the difficulty tiers were sane, whether the audio stems were separated properly and whether the uploader had the rights. Harmonix set the rules and the community enforced them, which meant a store with no editorial staff and very little garbage in it.

Version 2.0 went live on 15 February 2011, shortly after Rock Band 3, and added authoring for the pro guitar and keyboard modes. Those charts were closer to transcription than to game design, note for note on a real fretboard, and the number of people willing to do that work for a song they liked was smaller but not zero.

~ the store that outlived the game ~

Harmonix stopped shipping weekly Rock Band downloads on 2 april 2013 and the Network went quiet with it, no new submissions, no reason to keep the tools installed. The catalog stayed on sale though, sitting on the Xbox 360 marketplace for four more years while the console it lived on aged out. The service was formally closed in September 2017 and the songs were pulled from the Rock Band music store across Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii in February 2018.

Anything already bought kept working, which is the small mercy in this. Nothing bought could move. Rock Band 4 could not take Network songs forward because the licensing had been signed per platform and per catalog, so the two thousand tracks did not migrate, they simply stopped being purchasable. Harmonix reauthored a handful of the popular ones as ordinary paid downloads in May 2018. The rest of it exists now as a list of song titles on a wiki and whatever is still on somebody's unplugged Xbox 360 hard drive.

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