I’ve been playing around with the family in Rock Band after having an abortive experience with Guitar Hero III (after Easy I found it nearly impossible but remember I am an old fart for these kinds of games now).
Anyway, it seems obvious that the popularity of these games has driven quite a bit of extra music revenue. The problem I have with it is that it’s a large sinkhole to nowhere. I pay for a low-quality version of the song on Xbox Live and I can’t do anything with it. It’s stuck on my Xbox. I can’t play it on my iPod or anywhere else unless I resort to some of hacking to get at them.
Worse, buying a song for Rock Band doesn’t mean you’re going to have it for any subsequent version of the game and will end up having to buy it yet again.
Thinking about this it occurred to me that I’d spend quite a bit of extra cash if one of the developers created a standardized notation system and started selling these for all manner of songs to be downloaded on a PC and matched with our songs. In fact you might find artists out there starting to provide their own with their songs.
Bottom line is that this is something that would get me to re-invest in my entire library. I’m certainly not going to do that with every version of Rock Band that comes out.
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If you haven’t already, you might check out http://www.audio-surf.com/.
Audiosurf is a game that’s a cross between a Harmonix-style audio game and a Tetris-style puzzler. It works by analyzing songs you already have on your system and creating a game level out of them.
It’s not quite the same thing as the Rock Band experience, mostly due to the fact that it’s analyzing a combined track. If we ever get a music format that carries instrument information track-by-track, it would be a boon for these kinds of games. Then you really could do a dynamic-analysis version of Rock Band.