Well-done piece on the technical and financial aspects of uploading your own band’s tracks to be sold on the Rock Band Network. 30 cents is not as good a deal per dollar as Itunes, (50 cents?), but then again the competition is less.

Here is the official site from Rock Band Network. Obviously a lot of effort is required to make the leap from sheet music to a fully rendered song (video/art/lip-sync/different-difficulties) but the explanations are fairly detailed. Quite naturally a cottage industry has sprung up to “assist” (for a fee) the indie artist to alert the masses of their stardom.

This company will assist your band; listed here strictly because of a really great synopsis of the steps to get a sheet music set-up fully ready to be played fully in Rock Band.

Here are the Terms of Service if you wish to upload a song from your band.

A full listing of companies that did the certified training by Harmonix can be found here.

Now if you don’t think this is huge; think of this….. can you think of a greater change in musical notation in the last 300 years??????????????????????????????????????????????? I’m serious; if you know of an intervening notation/upload system in the last couple of centuries, comment below! Here are three excellent articles about this subject, from Wired; and Kotaku, and from Edge-online.

Here is an older article from Gigaom which gets to the nuts-and-bolts of how Rock Band Network works, and it’s potential.

Just on a related note, here is the link to the PSN blog, which explains the latest update and how that helps Rock Band players. A procedural note about the uploads, they will not be allowed to be downloaded until there is “sufficient content”. Just like with regular DLC, the PS3 content would be available a couple of days after Xbox, and Wii (through Wiiware) sometime later.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.