this is all very interesting to me and i think it's a brilliant move for harmonix. i've met a few people that work there and the working environment seems really, really great. nothing corporate about it and at the same time, they take it very seriously. seems to be working for them (to say the very least).
i was fortunate enough to produce, engineer and mix a record for a band that i'm pretty sure was the first band to be on the new RBN. when they first told me something was happening, they couldn't tell me anything about it, but i knew we were running stems for a rock band "thing". this was back in may/june and i was told it would be coming out this fall. it was a really interesting experience. had to keep my mouth shut for months as nothing had been announced and i didn't really know what was going on. thought i had a band getting a song on the new rock band release, just didn't know for sure.
i'd done stems for film/tv work, but nothing like this. the spec sheets were rough then, but they were reasonably clear as to what needed to be done. there was a bit of guess work involved, but thankfully we nailed it and they were very happy with the results. i hope to play the game and song i worked on at some point. don't own a gaming system, but the band of course does.
the popularity of the game is so massive, i almost expect this will become routine for many bands i work with. i'm not seeing this as an opportunity to make more money on records or mixing (and i really mean that), but i def plan to charge something for it in the future. haven't quite figured that out, but i'm sure you can imagine the amount of time that's added to mixing when you have to run stems - esp if it's going to be a large number of the songs. it also makes doing mixes alone a little tougher because they really need to be there when you're making decisions about game-play. (typically, i send mixes to a band/artist for review and make changes as requested. i do host some final mix sessions at my place, but that's somewhat rare).
i'll probably do something like a per-song charge for it. it wasn't a lot of work, but it took a couple of hours to create the stems and adding time is adding time, i can't NOT charge for it. just have too much going on to just throw that in - esp if they're going to sit in my control room with me and run them. time is time. on the first one, some of that time was trying to understand their spec sheets, which were very rough. i can't imagine the final spec's they've released look anything like what i saw. i wasn't even allowed to keep a copy. the band came by with it on a laptop and i was reading it off a screen. now that i pretty much know what needs to be done, i'd be able to go a lot faster.
