Behind the Music: A Rock Band Tell All

The Official XBox Magazine has a great interview with Alex Rigopulos which you should read in its entirety if you care at all about the game. It's full of gems:

Alex dishes on merch opportunities:

You’ll be able to take your band avatars, pose them, create album covers with your band logo and different scenes with your avatars. And then you’ll be able to turn that into real world stuff. For example, figurines based upon your Rock Band avatars, t-shirts with your fake band’s album art and your tour dates on the back from your accomplishments within the game, bumper stickers, old records, things like that. Really cool real-world merchandise based on this fictitious band that you’ve created in the game.

Alex on the future of the Rock Band platform:

In 3 to 5 years people are going to expect to be able to play with music as the normal way that they experience music that they love. If you have a favorite band that releases a new album, sure you’ll buy the CD but you’ll also want to go onto the Rock Band server and download the game levels based on those 15 new songs to experience them as an active participant in the music-making.

Alex tackles the "why not just play the guitar?" question:

The guitar controller is very abstracted from a real guitar, but even in the case of the guitar controller there are some foundation skills that you learn. Rhythmic impulse with your right hand and independent pitch control with your left hand — those are foundation dexterity skills that if you build them up playing the game, they will translate to being able to lock in and play in rhythm.

He goes on to say that it provides a window into the joy that comes with really playing guitar, that the singing portion will make you a better singer via its pitch feedback, and that playing the drums WILL TEACH YOU DRUMS, period.

Alex on smaller bands getting in on the action:

[Something else] we’re actually considering is releasing our own authoring tools out freely into the world, such that if you’re a band and you and your three friends are in your bedroom or garage making music, and no major label will even give you the time of day but you believe in your music, you can actually produce a game level yourself and send it to us for publishing on the game servers or distributing to your friends.

But like I said before, go read the whole interview.