Why Rock Band may be the greatest video game ever.

If you happen to be on my friends list or check my status on xbox.com you will have noticed that I have been playing Rock Band (a lot). The game has taken my house by storm and has even converted my more video game adverse roommates into full fledged video rock stars. Board game night has been transformed into Rock Band night. No one is able to ward off its Siren’s song (especially if that song happens to be Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So). The thrill of riffing a heavy metal guitar solo, spitting the the lyrics for the Beastie Boy’s Sabotage, or playing Travis Barker during Blink-182’s All the Small things is sometimes too much fun.

So, what makes Rock Band so compelling? Well, Rock Band isn’t an ordinary video game. In fact, it can hardly be considered a video game at all. Sure, Rock Band has all the conventions of a video game. You hook it up to your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, score points and are rated on your performance, and can win or lose depending on your execution. But really, Rock Band has more in common with a night of karaoke than with Halo 3. Rock Band’s allure is understood when you realize that Rock Band is more of a toy than anything else. An expensive, technologically advanced, extremely fun, toy. It has this in common with the Wii and Wii sports. When the Wii came out everyone and their mom was playing Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling. By shattering the conventions of what videogames are, and what they can be, companies like Nintendo and Rock Band’s Harmonix are opening up the video game industry to people it has normally shunned (the elderly, girls).

As if being the darling of the video game industry wasn’t enough for Rock Band, it is poised to lead a revolution in an another, more troubled, industry. Ever since Napster, the the music industry has been scrambling to find a way to make money on recorded music in the digital age. Less and less people are willing to pay for recorded music when it is just as easy (easier most cases, in fact) to download it illegally for free. This is good news for bands who prefer to make their money touring but bad news for record labels. Harmonix, with the help of their new parent company MTV, are offering record companies a new way to sell music online.  All ready, Rock Band has sold 2.5 million songs online.  The plan is to release 200 songs in 2008, including entire records such as Nirvana’s Nevermind.  Imagine record companies and bands not selling music online to listen to on your computer or ipod but selling music online to play.  I’m not saying that this will be a dramatic shift in the industry, but it shows that the music industry can still make money off of music if they embrace technology instead of fighting it.