News and announcements from That Authoring Group

[Inapprope]

Surely Harmonix would be interested in this debacle, considering they're one of the parties losing out on the potential money that could be made?

[EndSYNTH]

An Authoring group should be held accountable because they just want to get Bands into the game Cheap or expensive. If its what they want, and the bands are happy with it and can afford this kind of thing, It should be done. I find new bands I love and download every week on RBN.

I Think Authoring Groups should just get their **** together, and do what they should be doing, Getting music to the game, not causing **** storms. I WANT MY MUSIC >.<

[ThatAuthoringGroup]

Thats just it.

Our **** is together.

We've got dozens of songs ready, but we can't get proper tests and reviews from a chunk of the community.

Which is dragging our output down to a trickle.

We cant get our **** into the store if entire groups refuse to even look at our songs.

[RockBandand24Fanatic]

Thats just it.

Our **** is together.

We've got dozens of songs ready, but we can't get proper tests and reviews from a chunk of the community.

Which is dragging our output down to a trickle.

We cant get our **** into the store if entire groups refuse to even look at our songs.

I wish I had the money to PT/PR songs, I wouldn't ignore your songs, You're one of the best members of this community, and I respect what you are doing.

[atalkingfish]

I don't know enough to make an informed decision on the matter in regards to my opinion.

I do know a lot of people who feel like they're being picked on when, in reality, they caused a lot of problems themselves.
I do know that it's pretty hard to get a lot of people to hate you without doing anything stupid in the first place

On the other hand...
People with power can do rude and uncalled for things for the sake of their own self-promotion or benefit, which is even more annoying than what I was saying before.

Like I said, I do not know enough about the matter, and taking only information from one side would be an ill-informed decision on my part so I think I'll just stay away for a while.

[ThatAuthoringGroup]

The animosity towards our group comes from the fact that we're a 'fan' group that isn't doing this for money.

We're approaching big bands and saying we'll do your songs for next to nothing because we just want your songs in the game. We're not out to make money. We all have jobs and this is a hobby to us to help get the stuff we want by the bands we want in the game.

However on the flip side are the groups that want to make money at this and that's cool.

A lot of the bands we're working with wouldn't have even been in the game if we didn't offer them dirt cheap prices. Which again we don't mind working for.

The other side of this argument is that if we're charging nothing, or next to nothing that a lot of the bands out there would say well why should we pay anything to get our stuff in the game. That the way we do things will destroy the paying clients for the groups that do want to make money from Rock Band Network and charting.

So our 'crime' that is causing so many problems and getting us black listed is we're not looking to make any money from the bands, and we love the game enough to do this for free to get kick ass bands in the game.

And that MIGHT hurt the cash flow of other groups by causing some kind of future implosion of the paying process (which I think is just utterly ridiculous by the way).

My counterargument to that is these paying groups are a well oiled machine. They can get tracks near perfect in one run, where it might take us a few goes at it. So the paying clients will still pay for that better quality faster turn around time.


And again a LOT of the bands and labels we talked to that we eventually signed was not interested in the process because of the costs involved. So the bands we're working with would never have even been in the game in the first place (well outside of official HMX DLC that is).

So I fully believe that both the professional and the 'fan' charting services can peacefully co-exist, but we're not being given the opportunity of equality by all groups, for fear of something that MIGHT happen in some future point.

Now don't get me wrong there are some fantastic authors in the system that we're working with and are perfectly fine with the way we do things. However with the amount of songs we have, we need the full support of every tester and reviewer we can get to help get our songs through the process in a timely fashion.

And once again this isn't a blame game, finger pointing thing. I just wanted to let the people know who are excited about our output that we are doing everything we can to get our product into the store for them to purchase. And that product will be available, mark my words. It might take longer than it should, but we overcome this.

I was just tired of our group looking like slackers that had no work ethic in the eyes of the public because of behind the scenes bull****, and wanted to set the record straight on why our output is just a trickle.

[Blasteroids]

Yeah, tough call. I can see what you are saying, but somehow you need to find a happy medium. From what I have read on this forum there generally seems to be a lack of testers anyway. This, I presume, has lead to charting groups having to play-test each others work to get them approved. The old you scratch my back and I scratch yours method. However this fails once charting groups pay people to test because those without the money cannot pay for testers. This is where I think you have a big problem.

Wish there was a simple solution to it for you. Politics can be a real problem (for want of a stronger word) when money is involved.

[Quazifuji]

But... all these concerns. They're just concerns, right? Nothing's really happened yet as far as we know?

I'd say it's pretty immature to do this to TAG over mere paranoia.

From what I understand, there have at the very least been cases where TAG unknowingly contacted a bad that had already been signed (but not announced) with another group, and the band switched to TAG because their prices were better, so TAG has accidentally "stolen" some artists from other authoring groups. There may be other cases where other groups consider TAG's model to have directly caused a problem for them, I don't know.

Like I said, I think every group has RBN's best interests in mind, and I'm not sure if it's fair to call anyone's actions immature. Noble seems to be acting victimized sometimes, which on the one hand seems unfair to the other groups who are refusing to test TAG's songs as a result of a carefully considered decision based on what they believe to be best for the future of RBN, but on the other hand, it's also pretty clear that all he's trying to do is bring awesome music to Rock Band at any cost and his frustration at being boycotted for that is understandable.

Honestly, I don't think I'm informed enough to take a side, and even if I were to pick one based on my understanding I'm not sure which I'd take. TAG's licensed some really amazing bands (if Unexpect makes it through it'll probably be one of my favorite things to come out of RBN), but at the same time, I don't think RBN would be where it is today without giant for-profit authoring groups like Rockgamer and Rhythm Authors churning out a steady stream of great stuff, and I imagine groups like that wouldn't really be able to function on a price model like TAG's, because they need at least some of their employees working full time and there's no way to do that unless they're making a real profit.

Overall, it seems to me like a compromise might be best - maybe if TAG agreed to be a bit less aggressive with their pricing in the future if the other groups agreed to help test their stuff again (including what's already in the pipeline with the cheaper pricing model), but like I said, I don't really know the details. I do think, at the very least, this boycott is potentially hurting some artists' opinions of RBN (Devin Townsend's already expressed dissatisfaction, although his songs have been held up for other reasons already discussed too), and I think everyone can agree that that's definitely a bad thing.

[non_zero]

Who's refusing to test their stuff? The original conflict was with them and RockGamer and I see RockGamer testing their songs about as frequently as they test any other group's songs.

[Der_Lex]

After deleting a series of posts full of bleeped out words and angry shouting, I'd like to remind everyone to keep the discussion civil.