Harmonix unveils Rock Band Network, which allows just about artist to submit their songs as Rock Band playable tracks.  The plan itself is just genius, in my opinion:

Rather than deal with Harmonix directly, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers who will prepare the tracks for “Rock Band.” Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Harmonix will post approved tracks to an in-game download store separate from its existing “Rock Band” store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

Although originally designed to give indie and unsigned artists a way to sell music through the game, MTV quickly realized the Rock Band Network could be used to clear the bottleneck for major-label content as well. While the Harmonix team has grown from fewer than 10 programmers to a few dozen since MTV acquired the videogame developer in 2006, the company can only add about 10 new songs per week to sell through the “Rock Band” store. The same team has also been handling the development work for the upcoming “The Beatles: Rock Band,” due in September.

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Bravo, Harmonix.

UPDATE: Edited title for truth bombs.  Also, to be fair, I’m actually kinda looking forward to Final Fantasy 13 (haven’t looked forward to a FF game in a while…), and just like Choof, I’m eager to see how Diablo 3 turns out.  Regardless, I’m really looking forward to The Beatles: Rock Band.  Hell, just imagine how much fun this would have been in our college days.