MTV Games Seeks Buzz for 'Rock Band'

New Service Lets Average Users Upload Their Own Tunes to Videogame, but High Costs May Impede Many

MTV Games is hoping to goose sales of its flagging "Rock Band" series with a new service Tuesday that lets average users upload and sell videogame versions of their own music.

The service, known as the Rock Band Network Store, may offer a few minutes of fame to rudimentary garage bands by allowing millions of game players to access their music.

But given the technical know-how needed to format a song for the game—which may require users to hire a pricey third-party developer—the service could wind up serving mostly as a promotional platform for established acts with deeper pockets, rather than the typical shower singer.

"Rock Band" and its rival, "Guitar Hero," are two of the most successful videogame franchises to debut in recent years. But sales of both titles have slowed significantly in the past year, with combined sales in 2009 of $224 million, according to an estimate from Wedbush Morgan Securities—less than 50% their level in 2008.

Until now, most of the music available for play on either game has consisted of a limited number of songs, mostly by major acts like Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beatles.

With the new service, unknown bands are seeing their chance to get in on the act. But popular groups not quite big enough to make the "Rock Band" playlist are also preparing material for the do-it-yourself upload store, including Creed and Evanescence, each of which has sold tens of millions of albums in the past decade.

"We expected this to be an initiative that would appeal to unsigned artists," says Paul DeGooyer, MTV's senior vice president for electronic games and music. "What was surprising to us was how many artists with hit records have offered themselves up."

The Rock Band network has been running in a private, invitation-only testing mode since September. For now, it is to be available only to users of the Xbox 360, made by Microsoft Corp., which was also MTV Games' partner in building the Rock Band Network. MTV is part of Viacom Inc. The network eventually is to be made accessible to users of other game systems, like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3.

Preparing a song is complicated, and involves preparing an array of specialized digital sound files, lyrics, transcriptions and even instructions for virtual camera angles, lighting and choreography for the animated characters that perform the music within the game itself.

It has already spawned a cottage industry of companies offering to format recordings, for fees that can get steep. These contractors, with names like Rhythm Authors LLC and RockGamer Studios, typically charge $500 per minute of music.

TuneCore Inc. of New York is offering an introductory discounted rate of $999 a song—off from its usual $2,500.

"It takes a very specialized skill set," says TuneCore's chief executive, Jeff Price. (TuneCore's main business, uploading indie musicians' songs to digital music services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes store and providing royalty accounting, costs much less: $39 an album or about $10 a song, plus an annual maintenance fee of about $10 to $20.)

Other costs involved in creating a song include the purchase of an Xbox 360 console, "Rock Band" game discs and instruments, as well as a subscription to an online Microsoft game-development "community" that costs about $99 a year.

Rock Band Network lets users set prices anywhere from 99 cents to $2.99 a song. The company retains 70% of the sale price, with the rest going to the user. Given the figures, musicians must be fairly confident they'll sell real numbers of songs to justify their investment.

Minneapolis singer-songwriter Dane Schmidt, who was selected by TuneCore for a promotion in which the company plans to offer its "Rock Band" formatting services gratis for one musician a month, isn't sure the economics make sense.

"I don't like to put money where I don't know it will help me," says Mr. Schmidt, who says he doesn't play "Rock Band" or other videogames, and probably wouldn't have risked his own money on getting his song onto the game.

Some record-industry professionals agree. Sub Pop, a prominent independent record label, is paying various contractors to prepare 25 songs that it plans to upload to the store—all of them by acts among the label's most commercially successful.

Those include the Shins, whose 2007 album "Wincing the Night Away" reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album-sales chart; comedy-music duo Flight of the Conchords; and indie-rock stalwarts like Mudhoney, Sleater-Kinney and the Postal Service.

Sub Pop was the original record label of Nirvana, but much of that band's catalog is already available for "Rock Band."

The label is treating the undertaking as a serious creative endeavor. It hired a prominent record producer, Phil Ek, to mix the music before delivering it to the contractors who format it for the game.

"At $3 apiece nobody's looking to 'Rock Band' as a discovery tool," predicts Tony Kiewel, head of artists-and-repertoire at Sub Pop. "That's not going to happen," he says.