Last weekend, I was complaining that there still wasn't a way for bands to sell their music for Rock Band and Guitar hero games. Two days later, I'm
reading an article with one of the guys who are making it happen.
Rockband and Guitar Hero have had downloadable content for some time now. What you may not know is that users have been creating their own content for these games for even longer.
A Brief History:The first Guitar Hero game was released in 2005, and due to a tight budget of only US$1 million, featured cover versions of popular songs. It didn't take long at all before hackers worked out how they could replace the horribly censored version of Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name" with the original.
In making this discovery though, the hackers also found something else intriguing - the game worked by reading a midi file, and sending the coloured dots at you based on the notes in this file. What happened next was a brief explosion of hackers challenging each other to their home-made "Expert" versions of their favourite speed metal songs - the pinnacle widely regarded as DragonForce's "Through The Fire And Flames", which was later added as the final song on Guitar Hero III.
With the release of Guitar Hero III and Rock Band, Sony and Microsoft had their online networks together enough to allow downloadable song packages. The idea being that, aside from adding different instruments, nothing much has really changed across either series aside from the songs on each disc - and people would soon get over paying AU$80-100 simply for a few new songs. Fairly quickly, both services launched downloadable content - with customers being able to buy one song at a time, or packages by particular artists. This was a good start, but with song creation being a relatively simple [albeit incredibly tedious] and already-understood task, where was the opportunity for indie bands to work on their own songs and upload them for sale?
It took a while, but finally it's
here.
[This is seriously the best image I could rip from their site...]The future:User-generated content.
Three words [well, two hyphenated words and another word] that can cause pants wetting in boardrooms all over the globe.
Consider Facebook. The site has over 300 million users worldwide, yet barely generates any content itself. The actual content - the very reason you find yourself logging in every day - is created by the users. Facebook simply provides an [admittedly debatably] easy-to-understand interface.
Better yet, let's look at what Apple has done with iTunes and iPods. They released popular hardware that worked well, and bundled it with software that worked well. They sold many, and everyone was happy.
Then came the iTunes store, which could very much be considered to contain user-generated content. Apple isn't taking any part in recording or promoting any specific music, but is providing the gateway between artists and consumers - and in doing so, now sells 70% of digital music and 28% of
all music sold in the US.
By giving independant bands the power to create and sell their own content for Rockband, Harmonix are creating yet another game changer on the music landscape.
Soon enough, we'll have music and merch bundles that include Rockband Network download vouchers. We'll have kids all across the world trying to get 100% on Like Leaves tracks. We'll have Rockband Network Gift Cards being spent on 10 tracks about beards.
For Artists:Assuming you have a computer already, you're looking at a start-up cost of around AU$400 for the Xbox and software, and approximately AU$400 annually for the Xbox Live and XNA accounts. All up, you're looking at probably having to sell around 1000 copies of your song in your first year to turn a profit... Or 200 copies of 5 songs. Or 100 copies of your whole album, if you've got ten tracks that are worthwhile. Suddenly these figures are starting to balance.
Now imagine you have a radio hit. Your video gets played on Channel V or MTV or Video Hits or even rage. Or maybe people just share it online. Imagine 20,000 people download your song for free, and you don't make a cent from it. But it's just got that riff that people want to play along with. If even only 10% of the people who have that song on their iPod then decide that they'll drop the measly dollar to play your track on Rockband... You've made yourself a nice profit.
But what if your song is good? I mean really, really good? What if it's a song that is just really fun to play on Rockband with your mates? That, when one person downloads it, and shows three of their mates those three mates all want to go home and spend a dollar to download it, too?
Hell, what if you meet Moose at Fuse next year, and he likes your track and it gets a mention in CMJ and you get a little traction on US College Radio and 10,000 dudes all pay the dollar to get your track?
Now imagine you've done all that without paying a cent or offering any residual income to a label, publisher, or publicist.
Welcome to Music Industry 2.0.
