Rock Band's Alex Rigopulos:
The OXM Interview

OXM: Somewhere along the line I heard someone from Harmonix say that “Rock Band is going to be seen more as a platform.” People see an Xbox 360 as a platform; do you see it along those lines, where it’s own independent thing, and people will say they’re going to go play Rock Band the same way that they’d say “I’m going to go play Xbox”?

AR: Absolutely. You make an investment in a hardware console and thereafter you can buy a never-ending stream of games to play on that console. Or in the music universe you invest in a CD player and a stereo system as a platform and you can then go on and buy CDs or buy iTunes downloads for your iPod. The point is, when someone makes the investment in the Rock Band hardware and the basic software application, that’s a platform that they will be able to experience in a new way for years to come. And the idea is that, looking at it long term is where we see this category headed. In 3 to 5 years people are going to expect to be able to play with music as the normal way that they experience music that they love. If you have a favorite band that releases a new album, sure you’ll buy the CD but you’ll also want to go onto the Rock Band server the game levels based on those 15 new songs to experience them as an active participant in the music-making. But this is how people are going to come to expect to experience the music that they love. So for us the Rock Band hardware and software application are a music entertainment platform. Once you’ve bought it and trained yourself on it, it’s the environment you’ll expect to go to absorb all the music that you love and experience it in that way for years to come.

OXM: It may seem obvious, but I’m assuming that the relationship with MTV has given you licenses to more music, and you seem to have pretty optimistic goals for the amount of music you’ll be able to license. Can you give us a sense for why you’re thinking that? Is something like the entire iTunes catalog possible?

AR: The entire iTunes catalog - unlikely. This is sort of off in a boring business direction, but there are different kids of licenses. In the case of iTunes there’s no visual synchronization involved. You don’t need each individual artist’s approval for every song. Apple can do a deal with Universal Music Group who can decide if the terms are right to license their entire catalog on that platform because it’s just distribution of their recording. As soon as you start synchronizing the music with any kind of visual components, like a video game or a movie, major artists all have approvals over use of that content for synchronization with visuals. That’s really to protect the artist and the creators from someone using their song in the soundtrack to a porn movie or a violent movie that they wouldn’t approve of. So the point is, that kind of bulk license where you suddenly take 10,000 songs and put them on iTunes is just not possible from a legal and logistics standpoint.

And the other thing is, when you put a song on iTunes, you’re just taking their song and throwing it on the iTunes server. In the case of a game, you know we talk about downloading songs into Rock Band, you’re not really downloading songs you’re downloading game levels. We get the multitrack master recordings, and there’s an enormous amount of production work that goes into turning those multitrack master recordings into a game level. You need to author all the pitch and lyric parts for the singing, all of the rhythm parts at multiple difficult levels for the guitar, bass and drums, lip sync animation for the singers, lighting cues on stage, crowd cues…there’s a lot of game level design and production work that goes into each song. So the idea of going to 20,000 songs like you would by just dumping audio onto an iTunes server is a very different set of economics.

That said, we have insanely ambitious plans in this area and we do plan to get literally hundreds of songs in the first year alone, expanding to what I hope is thousands of songs in the years that follow. And we do view it very much like iTunes, in the sense that it is a platform, and we want people to think of Rock Band as the venue in which they play the music that they love, and that’s both on a catalog basis going back to the past four or five decades of rock n’ roll to build out a back catalog of music for people to play, but also frontline artists so when major new bands release new albums, day and date with new album releases those 15 new songs are going to be released to the Rock Band servers as well.

And going back to your question about MTV, they’ve been huge in this area. And the fact that we’ve been able to get almost entirely original masters in the game, the caliber of artists we’ve been getting in the game and the strides we’ve made in downloadable content has really flowed out of the relationship that MTV has with the labels, the music publishers and a lot of the recording artists directly as well.

PREV12345NEXT