[B]Interesting insight into the budding business of [I]Rock Band[/I] charting for alt rockers — transcribing their songs into the game's format so they can be sold to players in the Rock Band Network.[/B] That insight comes from former Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera, who is now a rhythm game entrepreneur, doing business development for Alt-Strum Productions, one of the many "aggregator" companies carving out this new music industry niche.

The industry exists, of course, because Harmonix took the genius step of creating a track authoring kit which lets bands turn their master tracks into fully interactive [I]Rock Band[/I] jams. Pay $99 for an XNA Creators Club account, sign up for the software at [URL=http://creators.rockband.com/membership_details]creators.rockband.com[/URL], download the kit (which is based on the fabulous [URL=http://www.cockos.com/reaper/]Reaper[/URL] DAW), and you're good to go.

Well almost. Herrera says convincing indie bands and publishers to go along can be a tough sell, especially since encoding a Rock Band track can cost as much as $10,000:

[INDENT] The biggest push back that we’ve gotten is the fact that labels are already very ****ed that they have to pay out 30 percent to iTunes...[the hard part] is trying to get them to agree to the 70 percent that Harmonix and EA and MTV Games is taking. That’s a huge chunk.

So companies like Alt-Strum and any other companies doing authoring and charting for bands, all of those proceeds have to be taken out of that 30 percent or charge an upfront fee. What we’re doing now is figure out a way where the bands are happy, the labels are happy, the publishers are happy, and we still have a cut to justify the work we’re doing.

[/INDENT] [URL=http://www.gameculture.com/2010/04/14/fear-factory039s-raymond-herrera-rock-band-music-industry]read more[/URL]

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