Rock Band Network Launched

The Rock Band Network is up on the Xbox 360 today and I’ve checked out what it has to offer. The interface is similar to the regular Rock Band store but with more sorting options. These options include sorting by artist, author (group who did the note tracking for the song), country of origin, decade, difficulty, genre, label, language and title. Along with those, there is a menu for a random song, “Harmonix Picks” and Top 10 lists of newest and highest rated songs. It is well organized for the most part but can sometimes be slow to respond, hanging up on some menu selections.

A major addition to the Network Store are the song demos. From my research, the demos are always the first minute of the song and cut off right at that minute, which can be a little jarring. At the end of playing that song there is an option to buy, replay or to exit out. Once purchased, there is an option rate quality of the note tracking at the end of the song. The authoring on the few I have played felt fine but the tuning on the levels of difficulty isn’t super consistent.

At launch, there are 105 songs with the majority of them being listed as having no label, a good sign, but there isn’t much representation from the larger indie labels like Sub Pop, who have promised support. Personally, there is a lack of the independent stuff I was looking forward to but two songs from The Shins and of Montreal isn’t too bad of a start. Hopefully, that will improve in the next few months. The songs are priced at 80 and 160 points, which is 1 and 2 dollars, respectively. Selected songs will come to other platforms at an unconfirmed later date.


Ben