On not having vocals audible on other consoles during online play

[toelessfoot]

No matter how fast an internet connection is there is always latency (the amount of time it takes any data to get from A and B no matter the bandwidth) and in order to have vocals online you would have to start the xbox with the person singing the vocals before the other ones... kinda a problem since the vocals xbox would have a different current score than the others, mistakes from the other members would show up way later and since latency varies there'd have to be enough buffer and so on. It has nothing to do with bandwidth (bytes per second).

The way they are doing online with the instruments is so that mistakes only show up once the data saying that the mistake has happened has reached you. So if you're playing along and your guitarist buddy in japan messes up you'll only hear the mistake (enter amount of latency time here) after he made it, most likely on different notes than the ones he pooched. This will be hardly noticeable for drums/guitars because the difference is this note versus that note but on live vocals it wouldn't work since it would'nt sync with the song. This might not seem like the best way to do it, but with the current internet it's the only way. It's not that bad because everyone starts at the same time and the songs will never chop up unless you lose connection to your band mates or one of their connections really really slows down, since all the game does is update the score and mistakes slower.

[toelessfoot]

I don't think online concerts would be out of the question though, since all they would have to do is have a delay between the time the band plays and the time the show is presented. Something like 20-30 second would probably be enough, record the instrument tracks and vocal track onto a server, match it all up once you have it all and present it to the world. This method would also allow vocals to be heard by the viewers, even though the band can't. Though because the server would have to send this data out to alot of users and store it, the fact that there is a vocal track recorded (which would make the size of the file exponentially bigger) would make it more difficult to distribute and manage. Therefore if we do see viewable concerts, it'll probably be without vocals with some special events with them :p