Rock Band's Alex Rigopulos:
The OXM Interview

OXM: One really big thing that we haven’t touched on yet is the Rock Band Council. Could you define it and give an overview of what you hope to achieve with it?

AR: Sure! Harmonix has been making music games for many years and normally the music selection process is all about the core sound track that goes on the disc. There’s this long set of criteria that come into play when choosing, out of the entire universe of possible songs, what core 40 or 50 songs are going to be in that soundtrack. The music team here is very well equipped to deal with that particular process, but once you move beyond that to downloadable content, the entire universe is open to you. And we really felt that it was critical for us to get to new perspectives. We really wanted to get some people from the music business, for example recording artists, instrumentalists on different instruments, recording artists from different genres, record executives, A&R executives who have been out there for years observing trends and know the back stories of some of these bands. These people bring a whole set of perspectives to the process of selecting music that we don’t have, and we thought it was important to try to break new ground in determining what this platform is and what it can be.

The Grateful Dead is a perfect example. For core gamers buying console games today, The Grateful Dead isn’t on their radar, but there’s a giant, intensely passionate audience for that band that is going to be able to experience that music in an entirely new way. Yeah, a lot of people are not going to be into the Dead, don’t care about them, pr don’t like them if they do know about them — but that’s the beauty of DLC as opposed to a core soundtrack. With a core soundtrack, you need to get this critical mass of music that’s going to work for this critical mass of people, but with DLC you don’t have those constraints. You can go out there and start assembling this universe of music where it’s understood that 90% of the people out there might hate this particular band. Those 90% of the people don’t have to pay for that music and experience it — and that’s true across the spectrum. The beauty of DLC is that you can actually tailor your play experience to the music that you personally, as an individual, care most about.

OXM:  I guess in the same way that people don’t need to buy every single CD that comes out in the record store every single week, it’s okay to just buy the CD’s that you’re interested in hearing.

AR: Exactly!

OXM: I think because it’s a different delivery method, gamers are all hoity-toity — they feel like they deserve content. But to a certain extent with DLC, they feel that “if you want me to buy it, you better make me want it.” And I think that this is where there is a main disconnect. I see it much more as à la carte.

AR: Absolutely, and I think that part of that just comes from the history of DLC in the video game universe. Usually it’s like you have a game like Battlefield and maybe there’s two or three or four expansion maps that are released through DLC for that and it’s expected that “If I’m a Battlefield player, I’m supposed to buy all of the DLC that’s made available for it.” When you’re talking about hundreds or eventually thousands of pieces of DLC, there’s no expectation that any one Rock Band player is going to buy all 300 game levels that are made available. It’s that he or she is going to choose the subset of that, that’s the music they feel the most passionately about and that’s the music he or she is going to buy for the game. It’s really a departure for the norms and expectations of DLC in the video game world because it’s really more like a music entertainment platform then a game platform.

OXM: On that level, it seems like really the only thing that restricts Rock Band is work “rock.” I’ve been a life long rock fan and I don’t feel that has to be apologized for, but if the goal is to bring music to the masses regardless of what the genre may be. All jokes about Polka Hero and Cowbell Hero aside — or even Sitar Hero for that matter — it seems like country is the next big, major American commercially successful music. It may be too early to talk about that stuff, but are you considering other genres beyond rock, because some people simply don’t connect with rock?

AR: Sure. Well, two part answer. First of all, rock is the unifying element so in a sense that is a limiting element. But rock is massively expansive, both in terms of time span and subgenres within it. And in the core soundtrack, we’re trying to cover as many bases as we can, from punk to metal to classic rock to southern rock, frontline stuff right now, progressive rock — there’s a lot of diversity in there. But of course there is the common unifying element in all of that, and that is the universe that we’re going after in Rock Band. I think there’s a huge amount of diversity that we can continue to explore for years and years within the domain of downloadable content just within the rock universe with Rock Band.

That said, Rock Band isn’t the end of what Harmonix has planned for the coming years. I really think that there’s a lot of unexplored territory in other genres of music that we very likely will pursue over the coming years as well. Country is an obvious one, hip-hop is another obvious one. So there are a lot of places that we haven’t even begun to even touch on yet that it’s very likely that we will over the coming years.

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