Rock Band promises Pop Idol for the Online Age

THE STUDIO behind classic rocker Guitar Hero has revealed the premise of its next musical title, Rock Band.

Published by EA, Harmonix (now owned by MTV, itself a Viacom company) will allow four players to sing, strum and beat their way to worldwide rock stardom - by playing along to pop songs with plastic instruments.

Online play is likely, with gamers able to create a virtual band across the world, rather than having to have all their bandmates together in the living room. Wannabes will be able to play lead and bass guitar, drums, or sing.

Given the massive success of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, as well as other music titles such as SingStar and Dance Dance Revolution, music publishers have been queueing up to get their music in front of a 'new' audience, with EMI, Hollywood, Universal, Warner and Sony all agreeing to license tracks for the game.

As with the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero, there will be downloadable content a-plenty, with EA suggesting that Rock Band could itself become a 'platform' for music. Er, right. Given that EA recently bought up online kareoke site SingShot, there's also (disturbing) speculation (not unconfirmed in the conference call announcing the deal) that there could be some element of user-generated content / video sharing involved in the title, meaning that the world can enjoy perving at 15-year-olds lipsynching to Britney Spears on the big TV screen, rather than just on YouTube.

No news on a release date yet, which means that we have at least a few months to fortify the defences before every living room in the country comes fitted with one of these contraptions as standard. Can't kids just learn to play real music? µ