Music Ally

We’ll start with the actual news. Harmonix has revealed 19 more tracks that will feature in The Beatles: Rock Band – including Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, A Hard Day’s Night, Helter Skelter and Ticket To Ride. Meanwhile, games industry site MCV is reporting that publisher MTV is ALSO working on a Beatles karaoke game for PlayStation 3: SingStar: The Beatles.

Now for the speculation: the Rock Band game debuts on 9th September, the same day as the band’s remastered back catalogue goes on sale on CD. And 9th September is also the rumoured date of Apple’s next product launch, possibly including its new Cocktail interactive album format. TechCrunch joins the dots: will all those Beatles albums also be launch titles for Cocktail?

Give it a week, and we’ll crank up our Yellow Submarine iPod rumour again…

The company running the VidZone streaming music videos service for PlayStation 3 says it’s been successful so far, punching above its weight to secure world premieres of videos ahead of MTV, MSN and Yahoo.

“Now it’s a case of labels coming back to us and saying ”okay, how can you lead the music video strategy for the new music release of our artists?,” VidZone director of marketing Louisa Jackson tells GamesIndustry.biz. VidZone now has more than 13,000 videos which have been watched more than 100 million times – and is planning to introduce commerce features and expand globally in the coming months.

“We’ll make some announcements in the near future about a number of different services and elements we’re going to be adding. Some of which revolve around more paid for items associated with music,” says director of new business development Michael Russo.

“We are exploring opportunities about interacting with other music related products around the music video. Whether they are available free or are charged is still being debated.”

Sony isn’t (yet) selling music downloads for its PlayStation 3 console, but it has just launched a streaming music videos service called VidZone.

It went live over the weekend, and promises a catalogue of thousands of videos, which can be watched individually or cued up into playlists. I’ve been having a play with the free service this morning: watch the video above to see how it all works.

Harmonix has confirmed that its Beatles-themed music game will be released on 9 September this year, and will be called The Beatles: Rock Band. An official site has gone live today inviting gamers to sign up for alerts when pre-ordering begins.

It’s a big deal – the game will launch simultaneously in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, and will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

The game will include support for guitar, bass, mic and drums, but will also offer “a limited number of new hardware offerings modeled after instruments used by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr throughout their career”.

Sitar! It has to be a sitar…

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