Hey - another cool thing DashGo got to do. And it’s only the start of a bigger program. Tapulous, creators of Tap Tap Revenge for the iPhone, just released Weezer’s “Troublemaker” as their track of the week. Get it here: www.tapulous.com
This is from my comment on the Techcrunch story
iTunes has about 5 million songs competing for buyers. Rock Band has about 103 as of May 13 (according to Wikipedia). So, if you’ve played through a few of those, there’s a good chance you want some more game-time.
Rock Band and Guitar Hero are fantastic additions to the sphere of music consumption, but I doubt it will ever be able to serve a significant number of artists, rather than a select group of superstars + specific promotional exclusives like Rev Theory.
It would be great if the consoles and developers opened up the distribution channel to indie artists, labels and aggregators to deliver song files into the Rock Band, Guitar Hero and other music game marketplaces. Even if the overall sales was small, the extra value for the core fanbase would be there and in aggregate sales would likely increase and drive greater engagement. Consoles are still too much like cellphones with a closed marketplace. Allowing some labels and musicians to be more innovative in product bundling and pricing will only grow the pie.
Fact is, it takes a long time to prepare these tracks. Working with Weezer, 8 weeks wasn’t enough time to release new songs from the upcoming record for sale via one of these games due to tracking times. With the right game API, it should be easy to for gamemakers to allow musicians to create their own files. Trust me, if anyone is a perfectionist about music, it’s a musician and gameplay won’t sufer.
