MTV and Harmonix, creators of the hugely successful franchise ‘Rock Band’ have made every indie artist shake with excitement by opening up their Rock Band Network Music Store to allow any artist to offer their music as a download for free.

Rock Band provides a great platform for unsigned artists and independent bands to get their music heard and if you take the time to prepare your tracks (all software is provided, with tutorials and tips) breaking your masters down into the separate instrument midi files, then your track could be live within no time at all.

However, their is another option to review. Online digital distributor Tunecore offer customers the service of having their tracks published on Rock Band for a cool $2500. As part of the package they offer to do all the leg work for you – mixing, mastering, authoring and transcribing your song. For any artist to have slaved away to create their own music, put their own style and personality, why would they then hand it over and lose all creative control to make it accessible on such a wide diverse platform as Rock Band? Especially for such an extortionate price.

It is important to point out that if you were to submit the tracks to Rock Band yourself, then for any sales of the tracks MTV would take 70% revenue leaving the artist the remaining 30%. So, you would think, if you were to pay Tunecore $2500 for their service that your revenue would improve. Well, actually no it stays exactly the same. 

Tunecore seem to have responded to the announcement by reducing their fee to only $999.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.