If you're an independent musician looking for as many ways to sell and promote your music as possible, and you or a friend has some experience with software development, you'll want to check out the upcoming Rock Band Network, for which Harmonix and MTV Games plan to begin beta testing in late August.
It's more complicated than posting a song to iTunes, but you'll get placement on a more exclusive platform.
(Credit: MTV Games)To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year.
You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game. Next, you'll have to submit your song for other creators to critique and finally to MTV Games for approval.
Once approved, the song will enter the Rock Band Network. All songs will debut exclusively for 30 days on the Xbox 360, and the Rock Band team will pick stand-out songs to make available to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles.
Under the network terms, musicians can charge between 50 cents and $3 per song, and they will keep a 30 percent cut of all sales. That may seem small, compared with the 70 percent cut musicians get for selling their songs on iTunes, which requires much less work, but Rock Band is a much more exclusive platform--you're much more likely to stand out here than among the bazillion songs available through Apple's music store.
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Zune speculation is an armchair sport here in the tech sector of the Pacific Northwest (especially when we're all housebound because of a few inches of snow), and today Todd Bishop at TechFlash posted some interesting excerpts from the Zune team's job listings.
Based on his post, it looks as if the Zune Marketplace will begin to use the back end from Musiwave, the European provider of music for mobile phones that Microsoft acquired a little more than a year ago--and if that doesn't point to a Zune service for mobile phones, nothing does--and will continue to feature DRM (couched in ever-so-reassuring phrases like "to let consumers enjoy music in new and interesting ways").
But here's something else: Zune is coming to Xbox. There's a job listing for a user experience designer to work on the Zune Device UI, Zune PC Client and--hang on a second--Zune Xbox.
Zune Xbox? Of course. Both Xbox Live and the Zune Marketplace use Microsoft's own pseudo-currency, Microsoft Points. Xbox Live already lets you download video content and stream movies on demand from Netflix (if you're a subscriber).
You can plug any MP3 player into the Xbox 360 and listen to a mix of your music as you play. So why not take all these pieces to their logical conclusion, and let you access the Zune Marketplace from Xbox Live? Integration would be particularly useful for Zune Pass subscribers, giving them another device on which to use their unlimited monthly listens and 10 permanent downloads.
Microsoft is trying to push Zune sales along with a price cut, as CNET's Ina Fried already reported Tuesday, and Donald Bell has the scoop on the firmware update that will deliver bug fixes, three new games, and head-to-head Texas Hold 'Em via the Zune's Wi-Fi transceiver.
But the most interesting part of the announcement was the advertising campaign. Not the advertisements themselves, although I'll be interested to see what the oddballs at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (who did the Gates-Seinfeld and "I'm a PC" ads) come up with. The fascinating part is that the campaign will focus on convincing users to download the free Zune software. Microsoft will still be doing other forms of advertising for the Zune players, but this TV campaign is all about promoting a product from which Microsoft earns no direct revenue.
The new Zune advertising campaign focuses on the brand and the software, not the devices.
(Credit: Microsoft)Why? Because music players were never the endgame. The company has always said that Zune is meant to be a broader entertainment brand that will find its way into other products. As I've posted before, a Zune interface for Windows Mobile 7 is a near-certainty, but I also would expect the Zune Marketplace to find its way into Xbox Live in short order--in fact, the new Xbox Live Experience gives Microsoft a much smoother way to introduce new features than the old "blades." I could also see Microsoft adding a Zune Marketplace page to the Media Center interface in Windows 7.
Of course, this (once again) raises the question of the future of the Windows Media Player. So far, Microsoft is committed to releasing a new version of the Media Player with Windows 7, in part for corporate customers who would never allow consumer software like Zune anywhere near their employees' PCs, but who still need media playback for corporate videos--training, presentations, and the like. But as long as Microsoft has three teams working on three digital media interfaces for Windows--the Zune software, the Media Player, and the Media Center software--there's room for consolidation, and my guess is that the Media Player will eventually get no further updates.
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