Here’s Your Ticket to Ride the Rock Band Beatles Train

You might not be able to buy love, but you can sure buy licensing rights for an incredible sum of money. This past week, MTV Games and Harmonix announced a groundbreaking partnership with Apple Corps, the company founded in 1968 by the Beatles to manage their music and intellectual property. The partnership would finally allow—for the first time ever—the licensing of Beatles music in a music rhythm game.

Long sought by both MTV Games and Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band), and Activision and Red Octane (the makers of Guitar Hero), the Beatles’ license is the veritable holy grail of music licenses, and it represents a huge coup for MTV Games and Rock Band fans. That Apple Corps is finally consenting to remaster and license Beatles’ music heralds a new era for music games, but is it really the era we want?

The short answer is definitely yes. Everybody loves the Beatles, including the music snobs who claim not to like them. Their anthology is vast, enjoyable, catchy, and well-suited for band play (excepting some of their songs like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Lady Madonna,” as this isn’t Keyboard Hero). Gamers have been asking for years for “Ticket to Ride,” “It’s Getting Better,” “Hey Jude,” and all the rest of the Beatles hits, including underappreciated but still awesome tracks like “Paperback Writer,” to appear in their music games. That’s finally happening, and Rock Band is unquestionably the best stage on which the Beatles could appear. Harmonix has been pumping out weekly downloadable content for Rock Band since its release last November. With Rock Band 2, its formula is almost perfect.

But perhaps the Beatles are just too big for Rock Band as is. The Beatles license probably cost MTV some inordinate amount of money, so they can’t release the tracks as individual downloads. Instead, gamers are going to have to buy a completely separate product—whether that’s a Beatles-specific version of Rock Band or a music product unrelated to the Rock Band franchise has not yet been decided—meaning a $60 purchase instead of however much you wanted to spend on à la carte songs like iTunes. Maybe you can’t wait to rock out to “Help!” but now you’ll also be buying “Dig a Pony” even if you don’t want it—and spending more in the process. It also sets a somewhat irksome precedent that seems to undermine the notion of Rock Band as a platform. The platform concept, and the way the games currently work, is that Rock Band’s tracks can be exported to Rock Band 2 so you don’t have to swap disks ever, and the downloadable content is completely backwards and forwards compatible with either game. If a hypothetical Rock Band Beatles isn’t exportable to the platform, then we’ve got a separate game existing separately from the Rock Band ecosystem.

Rock Band and Guitar Hero fighting over artists has also led to what many in the media are calling the “plastic guitar arms race.” MTV has signed the Beatles (so, frankly, they’ve won the arms race) and AC/DC, and Activision has signed Aerosmith and Metallica. That’s four exclusive, non-downloadable products that you can buy for full price in a store instead of buying online at whatever quantity you want. The AC/DC trackpack is exportable to Rock Band, but will the same be true for the Beatles? And Activision’s aggressive strategy to lock up bands from licensing their music to their competitors means that you’ve got to shell out for both games now to get your Metallica fill, and did anyone really feel satisfied with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith? Even as an Aerosmith fan I was disappointed by that cheap cash-in.

Sure, the Beatles in Rock Band (or not) is huge. I already have the cash in hand, waiting to buy that Lennon/McCartney goodness. Still, that’s just because they are the Beatles. Would you shell out $60 for a Fall Out Boy package? Gamers better hope that the companies making these games are not getting the wrong idea.