By Silva

For those of you who still enjoy a good session of Rock Band, there is terrific news today. Harmonix has introduced their newest addition to the music platform, Rock Band Network. Around 12PM EST, over 100 new songs were dropped into the new store (separate from the original store, you now have an option from the games' main menus). According to the RockBand twitter page, this number is being increased throughout the week. Click in for more.


Once inside the Network store, you'll find many ways to browse and sort all the songs in the catalog, such as by artist, song name, genre, decade, and a new field, rating. This is great thing, because soon it will house thousands of songs and wading through them needs to be as smooth as possible.. Also, the top ten songs in various categories can be viewed.

When viewing a song, you have the option to preview and download, just like before, but there is a new option of downloading the demo. You can take a demo downloaded and play it in quickplay. It consists of playing the song normally, but at the 30-60 second mark, it stops and thrusts you into a pop-up menu where you can replay, go to a new song, rate or delete the demo, or quit altogether.

So far, in the limited time Chase and I messed with it, we noticed a few bugs. The menus seem to be really slow compared to the rest of the game, the previews aren't of the highest quality, the layout of a song's info isn't too intuitive, and backing out to the main menu took a long while. Also, we found that some songs didn't get updated to the song list when going to quickplay the first time around. To remedy this, we deleted the demo and re-downloaded it. Sure, there are a few noticable items that make this addition feel tacked on, but the overall scope of what the Rock Band Network does completely overshadows them.

This is going to be an exciting endevor for the music series' fans and yet another huge revenue stream for Harmonix, EA, and MTV Games. All I know is that I've already found my guilty pleasure song, Top Back by Alias Unknown, and writing this is getting in the way of me playing it.