While I’ve been out gallivanting around the country (well, around the Eastern part of the country…well, around the area between here and the Maryland coast), the Rock Band Network has moved inexorably forward, unleashing new songs on a near-daily basis.

This latest batch features tunes that have shown up since last Friday and today, and includes several notable tracks — namely, two from Flight of the Conchords, and another each from The Shins, Attack Attack!, and RBN dominators The Main Drag.

It’s a big list, so I’ll post it after the break. Meanwhile, the RBN Vault has been updated accordingly. And hey, bands and/or band representatives? If you see anything missing or incorrect in the Vault, just let me know and I’ll fix it pronto. I’m here to help fans find you guys, you know? Continue reading →

Want a sneak peek at some of the bands expected to be hitting the Rock Band Network? You’re in luck; last week Harmonix put up a nice Q&A with a number of label reps, who spill the beans about some of the artists preparing to enter the RBN arena.

I won’t do a whole list here, but there’s a particularly juicy quote from Sub Pop rep Tony Kiewel, who confirms some more bands from the legendary indie label, including Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Sunny Day Real Estate. Brandon Linnell of Century Media Records also confirms another band I’m particularly excited to check out in Rock Band: King’s X.

Check out the whole article for an idea of what RBN means for labels.

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Yup, looks like RBN’s gonna update daily. Hold me.

Now, I don’t expect to be updating the list every day; I probably will try for every week. But this is a fun pack, featuring one of my favorite Jonathan Coulton tunes, a Bang Camaro classic, and a bunch more, so I thought it bore mentioning.

Alchemilla	Bleeder	80 MS	N/A	N/A
The B.O.L.T.	Genius	80 MS	N/A
Ballyhoo!	Cali Girl	80 MS
Bang Camaro	Push Push (Lady Lightning)	80 MS
Cetan Clawson and the Soul Side	White Heat	160 MS
Eric Harm	Stegosaurus Song	80 MS	N/A	N/A
Jonathan Coulton	Code Monkey	160 MS
Pollyn	Gave It Up	80 MS
Super Gravity	Makeup/Breakup (Original Version)	80 MS	N/A	N/A
Terrorhorse	Packet Flier	80 MS	N/A	N/A
Voodoo Pharmacology	Minnesota	80 MS	N/A	N/A

The RBN Vault has been updated accordingly. All these songs are available for purchase in the RBN Store now, so what are you waiting for?

[image: Dale May]

I think I just sprained something. But you get to benefit from my pain, because whatever I sprained, it was in the process of putting together a page of all the tracks released for the Rock Band Network so far. Behold! The RBN Vault.

Why a whole separate page? Well, see, the Rock Band Network is sort of a separate thing from the main Rock Band store. For one thing, the songs are only available on 360 at the moment; for another, they’re priced much more variably than those in the main library. So I figured that warranted a separate page, for now at least. As the RBN library grows I may fold those back into the main Vault, but for the moment I’ll be keeping them separate.

And how often will this be updated, you ask? I haven’t the foggiest idea. The image on this post that I grabbed from the Rock Band Zine seems to be suggesting we’ll be getting “new songs daily.” This idea is exciting to me as a music fan, and terrifying to me as a person covering music games. I don’t think I’ll have the temporal or mental bandwidth to update the list daily. Weekly? I hope so.

While we figure all this stuff out, why not head on over to the shiny new RBN Vault, have a look a round, and let me know if you find anything that doesn’t look, read, or work right? I would truly appreciate it.

Rock on, friends.

Well now, this is unexpected: According to Billboard and MusicWeek, at least, the Rock Band Network finally goes live today, for real. And there’s definitely a new update for Rock Band on the 360 — only it doesn’t seem to actually enable RBN in the game.

Still, Billboard and MusicWeek both seem fairly unequivocal in their assertion that RBN is “open for business.” And a variety of Harmonix employees have been posting to Twitter with references to today being a “big day.”

I’ll update when I learn more, deal? Deal.

UPDATE: It’s now live, like really and truly live. [Edit: Well, in the U.S., at least. It's supposed to be live in Canada, but there seem to be some issues with that. And Harmonix says they'll update on availability in Europe shortly.] Fire up Rock Band 2, accept the updates, and head to the Music Store — you’ll find a new option for Rock Band Network under there. Away from your 360? Don’t worry, I’ll have a video for you in just a few.

UPDATE 2: I’ve put a video tour after the break. As of 1:20 Eastern time it just finished uploading, and apparently YouTube takes awhile to fully process the video, so it may look like crap for awhile. Done!

UPDATE 3: That was fast! @RockBandNetwork says RBN is now live in Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Singapore and Sweden, “where RB2 DLC and XNA are both supported.”

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Over the weekend, Kyle A. at RBDLC noted that the Rock Band Network had reached a significant milestone: More than 100 songs have been approved to go live along with the official launch of RBN. (Which should be, y’know, any day now. We’re running out of “early 2010″ over here.)

RBDLC has the full list of approved tracks, along with this interesting observation:

Considering that the week RB2 came out we had a “mere” 96 songs between the disk and DLC, that’s one hell of an achievement, and that doesn’t even count the stuff that will pass between now and the actual launch day.

With the Rock Band DLC catalog well over 1000 songs at this point, it’s easy to forget it had such humble beginnings.

Now I just need to figure out how I’m going to cover all this new stuff. Posting updates similar to the ones I do for releases in the main music store seems like it’d quickly become a full-time job. Any suggestions?

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I’m not going to be posting about every new artist that appears on the Rock Band Network, because that would very quickly begin taking up every waking moment of my day. However, I saw these two videos of Rock Band Network tracks over at RBDLC and couldn’t resist sharing them.

The first is a serious jazz tune: “Footloose and Fancy Free” by Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. The thing that’s interesting about this is that the “guitar” track is actually piano — something Guitar Hero has done in the past but Rock Band has generally shied away from. But what’s even neater is that the “vocal” track is actually a sax line, intended (one would assume) to be played with a sax or other horn; the “lyrics” are simply the notes being played. Continue reading →