Furthering its claim of being just as much of a music
platform as it is a videogame, Harmonix and MTV Games today announced that Judas
Priest’s 1982 classic, Screaming For
Vengeance will be the first complete album to be added to the Rock Band downloadable content catalog,
slated to hit April 22 on Xbox Live Marketplace and April 24 on the PlayStation
Store.
Each track will be available for $1.99 per track (160
Microsoft Points) or $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points) for the album. The complete tracklist may be
found on the official website.
Full album releases were promised by Harmonix before Rock
Band even hit the market, but it has taken five months before the first
release. Harmonix's CEO Alex Rigopulos told Kotaku
in an interview, “...a big reason that it's taken us so long to get them to
market is that the actual technical delivery of the assets required for any one
song - they're actually pretty complicated. You're often dealing with masters
for the older stuff that were recorded on analog. Often it takes a long time to
even locate those masters. The right takes and the right edits have to be
found, and in some cases old gear that's not in use anymore has to be
resuscitated to transfer the stuff to digital.”
While $1.99 is the standard price for songs, the $14.99
price isn’t the standard one for albums. “There's not going to be a standard
album pricing. It's going to be a function of how many songs are included in
the album...essentially there will be a volume discount applied,” explained
Rigopulos.
Harmonix also revealed that the next full album to be
released in May will be the self-titled album from The Cars , with The Pixies' Doolittle to hit in June.