Just a few months after rival *Activision* brought in *Yahoo* vet Dan Rosensweig to head up its Guitar Hero division, comes news that MTV Games has added two new senior execs to its roster to prep for the launch of The Beatles: Rock Band. THQ’s former EVP of publishing Scott…

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr helped *Microsoft* kick off its E3 keynote with a wave of harmonized sound: a trailer and gameplay footage from the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band. The game drops on September 9—coinciding with the release of all 13 of The Beatles’ remastered albums—and includes previously unreleased…

After giving precious few details when they announced the title back in September, MTV’s Harmonix games studio and The Beatles’ *Apple* Corps have opened BeatlesRockBand.com to offer a preorder sign-up for the upcoming game based on the band—and, as the name suggests, turns out it’s a Rock Band spinoff after…

Yet another example of how music labels just can’t get along with digital content companies ... *Warner Music Group* (WMG) and MTV Games are in a standoff over pricing for Warner artists’ tracks in the Rock Band franchise, an impasse that could ultimately mean no new WMG tracks in the…

Music video games are hailed as possible saviors of both the video-game and music industries, but new figures show that appetite for games like Guitar Hero is falling away as entertainment spending slows. Variety.com reports that Viacom-Harmonix’s Rock Band 2 sold 809,000 copies last year domestically, while Activision-Blizzard’s Guitar Hero:…

Viacom’s Harmonix is breaking out of its annual development cycle for Rock Band this year to focus on the new Beatles’ game, due out in time for the holiday season, and to avoid the limits that come along with cranking out new versions, CEO Alex Rigopulos told attendees at Billboard…

Having proved that it can sell individual song downloads in the millions after only five months in operation, MTVN’s (NYSE: VIA) Rock Band video game will begin selling full-length albums starting next week with Judas Priest. So far, Rock Band has sold more than 8 million downloads of roughly 140…

Buried within Viacom’s (NYSE: VIA) 10-K annual report filed yesterday with SEC is an interesting and elusive number: the earnout that the developers of Guitar Hero and Rock Band will get over the next two years. In October 2006, the parent company Harmonix was bought by MTV Networks for $175…