Future of the Rock Band

Yesterday was a fairly important announcement when it comes to video games. Ok not just video games but rock n roll. Guitar Hero has been an enormously successful game on video game platforms, allowing players to "play" a simplified guitar to real songs, making it the karaoke of music games. Peripheral games have been leading the innovation charge as of late in the video game category.

Now comes Rock Band. Created by EA and MTV "Rock Band is to completely change the way people interact with and enjoy the music they love," said Jeff Yapp, EVP, MTV Program Enterprises. "By joining forces with EA and the music industry's largest record labels and publishers, we are striving to create a groundbreaking new platform that allows people to connect with their favorite music and artists in ways they never have before."

Rock Band will allow gamers to perform music from the world's biggest rock artists with their friends as a virtual band using drum, bass/lead guitar and microphone peripherals, in addition to offering deep online connectivity. Built on unprecedented deals with the world's biggest record labels and music publishers, the music featured in Rock Band will span all genres of rock. EMI Music Publishing and Warner/Chappell Mussic will be opening up their catalogs for the game and EMI, Hollywood Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Enterprises and Rhino Entertainment are going to be supplying master recordings for the game.

Rock Band represents a huge evolution in video games, but also in music and the MTV model. MTV has capitalized on the social aspect of music to build a huge (often mis-managed brand that sometimes doesn't resemble music) that continues to remain cool. This is the perfect marriage of social networks with music, allowing the ultimate connection of consumers in gaming activity to create their idol music fantasies. MTV is really taking the idol trend to a new level and by combining it with video games is genius. With the legitimization of air guitar, who knows MTV may be finding new talent from this. All in all a brilliant idea!

Legendary

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