In the Garage: Rock Band Network Q&A

Up to this point, the weekly Rock Band DLC releases have been a product of Harmonix working with music labels and doing the legwork to inject the necessary gameplay into the songs. With Rock Band Network, Harmonix is handing its tools over to the masses, allowing just about anyone to get their music into the game and turn a profit on it. It's a potentially exciting development for Harmonix, musicians, and players alike, and one that, since it was first revealed last month, has raised a number of questions about the whole process. I recently had a chance to speak with Harmonix's Greg LoPiccolo about some of the nuts and bolts of how Rock Band Network will work.
 
Rock Band Network seems like a pretty big step for Harmonix and music games in general. How long have you been working on this, and what would you say your biggest hurdles have been thus far?

LoPiccolo: We started working on it in March of 2008, so it's been a year and a half. I guess the biggest hurdle has been the sheer complexity of it. You know, we're owned by a big media company. Just the legal issues around allowing everybody in the world to work up their songs and present them and get paid for them. It's been a very complicated business landscape, and technical landscape. All the infrastructure necessary to expose our tools to people, allow them to audition stuff on the console and upload it and to get it reviewed. As we dug into it, it became this amazingly complicated process. But we worked through it all, and it all works, and we're enormously excited about where we've ended up.

Let's talk about what the process is like for the end-user. Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann has a group called Midnight Brown. Walk us through what the process would be like for him to self-publish a song on Rock Band Network.

LoPiccolo: OK, so, there's a number of steps. First thing he needs to get an Xbox 360 and a Gold account. He has to sign up for an XNA Creators Club account, and that's $99 a year. He has to record his band in a multitrack environment, go to a studio or whatever. He has to take the multitrack files, download documentation from our website, mix the audio files into multitrack stems as per our spec, so the drums are mixed in a certain way and guitar and vocals are mixed in a certain way, and then he has to open them up in a digital audio workstation and chart all of the notes and the vocal parts using MIDI to a spec that we provide. Once all that's done, he can download a free PC tool from us called Magma, which takes all the properly formatted audio and MIDI tracks and sorts them up, checks them for errors, encrypts them, and turns them into an archive that's appropriate for upload. Then he logs onto creators.rockband.com with his Creators account, uploads the file to the website, at which point it is placed into play-test review. So all the other Rock Band Creators Club people can download it and play it and provide feedback.

So that's a pure peer-review process then?

LoPiccolo: There are two sequential processes. The first is play-test review. It's not a formal review process, it's more people giving you feedback on your songs and your authoring. Just the craft associated with it. Does your song sound good? Are the parts appropriately authored? Are they difficult enough, or easy enough? You get placed automatically into that, but that is a somewhat optional process. You basically stay in that process as long as you consider it to be useful. Once you're done with that, you can, at your option, take it out of play-test review and into formal peer review. Peer review is more technically oriented. It's peers reviewing for technical compliance, copyright infringement, profanity, basically just confirming that the thing is actually appropriate for sale to the public.

For this part of the process, for stuff like profanity and for copyright infringement, is this relying entirely on human ears? Is there any sort of software that's going to try and look out for that stuff, or is this just manual?

LoPiccolo: We do have a separate software process running in the background that can flag a certain amount of copyright infringement and profanity issues and so forth. It's a redundant system. So we have that running, but we're also relying on the peer review process to give us a lot of information about what's actually appropriate for sale and what's not. So once it passes peer review, it gets automatically dropped into the Rock Band Network store, which will be available on the Xbox 360 and subsequently on the PS3 in a limited context by way of a title update that we'll drop probably in early September. The store itself will throw the doors open later this year, but we don't have an exact date yet.

And at that point it's just up and it's available for anyone to purchase, right?

LoPiccolo: That's right. You can preview the first minute of any song for free, download and play it, and authors can set their price. We have a few different pricing tiers, though we haven't finalized that stuff yet.

Is it possible to adjust prices after a piece of content has been posted, and is it possible to put stuff up for free?

LoPiccolo: It is not possible to put stuff up for free. I believe it is possible to adjust pricing on a quarterly basis.

Are there any provisions for bundle pricing? It's something that the regular Rock Band downloadable releases tend to do, if you buy all three songs you get a price break, or if you buy a full album you get a price break. Is that a concept you're going to extend to the Rock Band Network as well?

LoPiccolo: It's something we might consider for the future, but there's no support for that in the initial offering.

You had mentioned that there's that $99 Creators Club entry fee, and then all of the Rock Band Network sales are going to leave 30% of any profits to the creators. Any other financial barriers that are going to be inherent to this process? Any of the software, payment transfer fees, things of that nature?

LoPiccolo: No. You need a digital audio workstation to do the work. We are recommending Reaper, and we have worked with the Reaper developers to custom-tune their workstation for use in authoring Rock Band tracks. That's shareware, I think they're looking for $60 to get a license. You don't need to use theirs if you have an existing digital audio workstation. You can use Cubase or any of the other stuff that's out there. No, the only actual fee is the $99 Creators Club account, plus the Gold account that you need on the Xbox 360.

Now obviously this is a pretty terrific promotional opportunity for a lot of musicians, and I'm sure that there's plenty of people at Harmonix that would disagree with this statement, but musicians don't necessarily make the best game designers. What do you have in place for people who want to get their music into the game, but don't have the want or the means to sequence their own note patterns?

LoPiccolo: There's already sort of a cottage industry building up out there in the enthusiast community for people who are starting up their own shops to do fee-for-service stems mixing and authoring. Those are all arrangements that we're excited are taking place, but those are all basically business arrangements between bands and third parties. You won't necessarily have to author your own stuff. There will be people out there in the world that are willing to do it for you if you pay them.

But that's not something that's being set up formally through Harmonix or the Rock Band Network itself.

LoPiccolo: No. We have forums within the Creators Club website, there are matchmaking forums so that you can solicit people to help you or present your services. So we provide the communication for people to connect to each other, but we're not privy to any of the actual agreements that they come to.

Going back to the software that you'll actually use for all of the sequencing, how deep does that stuff go? Will people be able to tweak stuff like facial animations, or is that all handled auto-magically?

LoPiccolo: You're responsible for all the note and vocal line authoring. You have to do that to make it work. The lip-sync and the animation authoring and the lighting and cameras and so forth, the Magma tool will do a basic cut of that stuff, like it'll automatically author it, but you can go in if you're so inclined and override any of that stuff and custom tune it to the way that you want it. So if you don't want to mess with it, it'll basically do a reasonable job just out of the box, but if you want to get into that, then you can go in, and it's all basically part of the MIDI language. You can go and learn those cues and customize them to whatever extent that you want.

But as far as note-tracking and vocal stuff, there's no kind of automatic pass on that stuff? You have to manually do all that first try?

LoPiccolo: The guys internally built a tool that will extract a first-cut note track for the kick and snare audio parts that will be appearing in the open beta version of Rock Band Network. So some of the drums, there are ways to do a first pass automated authoring, but then you have to go in and clean that up, and things like guitar and so forth you pretty much have to listen to and do it by hand. That's how we do it!

I could definitely see some sort of automation being really helpful, though, with the vocals specifically, just because that strikes me as something that might be easier just to get off the actual sound than trying to guesstimate on the line where that goes. If you're off-key in the vocals, there's potential for discrepancy between the actual vocal sound and how you're tracking it.

LoPiccolo: What we're doing is providing the documentation and tips and tricks and techniques to allow people to do it pretty much exactly the same way that our internal people do it. I wouldn't call it trivial, it's a craft, a skill that it takes a little while to acquire, but we don't have any secret knowledge here that we're withholding from anybody else. It's pretty much something you can learn to do.
 
There seem to be a lot of questions out there about who, exactly, Rock Band Network is for. Are there any hard limits on the types of acts you'll allow through, be it the content type or the relative stature of the band?

LoPiccolo: No. The songs, as you know, have to be not copyright infringing. They have to essentially be T-rated, they can't contain profanity. There's a set of community standards they have to adhere to. Beyond that, no, we're actually very excited about a huge variety of different styles and genres and we're very curious to see what people come up with.

It seems like there's a terrific potential for music that doesn't fall squarely in the realm of rock to show up on Rock Band Network. It raises the question of whether every song submitted needs to be able to conform to a full four-piece format?

LoPiccolo: No, you can submit songs with, say, for instance, no vocals. You can submit instrumentals. The format will support less than four instruments. [NOTE : Harmonix PR has also stated that songs can be anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length.] One of the things about this initiative we're pretty up-front about is the fact that it's hard for us to predict what people will do. So we don't really have the answer for every scenario, but I think our initial instinct will be if it passes muster legally, then I think we're happy to push it into the store and see what people think of it.

So it's as much a learning process for you as anyone.

LoPiccolo: Absolutely! That's one of the things that we're most excited about. Unlike these games that we craft very carefully and release them, we can't completely predict the outcome of this. One of the things that's most interesting to us is seeing the stuff that people come up with that we don't expect.

It definitely seems like there's some exciting potential for some chaos.

LoPiccolo: For us, the best possible outcome is some genre takes hold in the Rock Band Network. Like people start authoring up techno songs or klezmer or reggae or who knows what, you know, and it turns into a thing.

I predict ska. Ska is going to make its big comeback via the Rock Band Network. Mark my word!

LoPiccolo: It would be fine by us.

The Beatles: Rock Band will introduce multi-part harmonies to the Rock Band formula when it comes out in September. Is this something that'll be available on Rock Band Network, either at launch, or at a later date?

LoPiccolo: It may be available at a later date, though we're not committing to it at this point. It will not be available at launch.

It seems like the whole Xbox Creators Club is key to the process at the moment. Without any obvious analogs on the PS3, PSP, or Wii, how will you bring Rock Band Network to those platforms? Additionally, what's your region availability going to be like, at launch and six months down the road?

LoPiccolo: It's our intention to provide selected material from the Rock Band Network on both the PS3 and the Wii, and we're engaged with both Sony and Nintendo to figure out specifically how to bring that about. We would like to make at least the best material that emerges on the Rock Band Network available across all platforms. As far as region availability goes, at launch you can only submit songs if you're in the US, though the Rock Band Network store will be available in both North America and most of Europe.

How will songs purchased through Rock Band Network integrate into both the store and the game? Will they become part of the World Tour setlist like any other DLC, or is there going to be some kind of community ghetto for those tracks?

LoPiccolo: They get fully integrated into your setlist along with all of your DLC, so you can choose it as part of the tour. It just works like any other DLC. [UPDATE: Harmonix PR has since clarified that RBN content will work in quickplay, competitive modes, and online, but it is not compatible with the World Tour mode.]

How have the music labels that you're already working with responded to the idea that this previously exclusive playground is being opened up to the masses?

LoPiccolo: For the most part it's been really enthusiastic, because those very same labels generally have a long list of songs that they would like us to put into the Rock Band store but we simply haven't had the bandwidth to author up ourselves. In very many cases, these same labels are like "Great! We'll just take the stuff over ourselves." Many of them are making plans to essentially author up their own material and submit it on their own schedule.

I could see the peer review process being a bottleneck. How many songs do you expect to be able to approve on an average week?

LoPiccolo: I don't know if I'd want to put a number on it, but we're not terribly worried about it, because we think that as the volume of songs scales up, the volume of peer reviewers available to evaluate songs will scale right along with it. It's hard for us to say, but I wouldn't anticipate more than a week or two delay added onto the release by the peer review process. In the context of this kind of initiative, it's not very much time.

How are you going to let people sift through what I have to imagine will be an intimidating amount of content? Will there be some kind of user-rating system in place?

LoPiccolo: The UI in the actual store will allow you to filter by all different sorts of criteria. On the console itself it's pretty easy to drill down to what you're looking for, whether it be genre or era or band. You can even sort by who charted the song, for instance. On the website, as each song is approved for sale, we auto-generate a webpage based on that song, with all of the relevant band information and so forth. As the song-count goes up, it's our intention to revise the website and add more review features and recommendation features and so forth and really turn it into a full-featured music network. So really, most of the sophisticated filtering and sorting and recommendation features will end up on the website.

So you'll still need to go to the website to sift through some of that stuff, but like you said, you can still preview tracks through the game directly.

LoPiccolo: Yeah, that seemed like the right tool for each thing. On the console, the controller's somewhat limited in terms of how crazy we can get. What we imagine is, as we get up into the thousands of songs, what we anticipate is people will do a lot of browsing and research on the website, and then they'll go to the console. And you can actually purchase things on the website, and it'll just queue them up so the next time you power up your console it'll download them.

So what's your time frame look like for getting this stuff in the hands of the creators and rolling out the Rock Band Network officially?

LoPiccolo: We have a closed beta currently underway, I think we're opening up the website and the title update to the general public in late September. That's the point at which anybody can submit songs. And then we'll open up the store to the public once it's got a critical mass of inventory later in the year.

So you definitely targeting before the end of '09.

LoPiccolo: Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much for your time.

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