Remember the lackluster GHTunes feature of Guitar Hero: World Tour, where you create your own songs from canned instrument sounds by pressing buttons on the guitar and drum controllers? It’s a plausible idea, but in practice the “songs” produced this way sound like MIDI songs gone horribly, horribly wrong.

If you don’t believe me, just take a listen to the all time best GHTunes songs:

1. Super Mario Bros theme
2. Super Mario Bros theme
3. Keyboard cat
4. Super Mario Brothers 2 Vadrum
5. A Day in the Life (Pokemon Battle Song)

So… yeah. It’s one of those “features” that only works on a marketing weasel’s checklist. It is so anti Fake Plastic Rock in practice that the world might actually have been better off without it.

Last week, Harmonix dropped a bombshell on the industry with the announcement of the Rock Band Network. The Rock Band Network is sort of like GHTunes, but using real studio masters of bands playing their music:

Although originally designed to give indie and unsigned artists a way to sell music through the game, MTV quickly realized the Rock Band Network could be used to clear the bottleneck for major-label content as well. While the Harmonix team has grown from fewer than 10 programmers to a few dozen since MTV acquired the videogame developer in 2006, the company can only add about 10 new songs per week to sell through the “Rock Band” store. The same team has also been handling the development work for the upcoming “The Beatles: Rock Band,” due in September.

“Once we flip on the infrastructure, we can go from a few dozen people capable of doing this work to hundreds of people or more,” Harmonix founder/CEO Alex Rigopulos says. “We can ramp up by a factor of 10 or more the rate of production of content.”

Harmonix will be providing the tools to convert songs into the Rock band format directly to the record companies. This will allow the record companies to sell their songs directly through the game just like they sell them in iTunes. In theory every song in a band’s catalog could be made available.

This puts the tools in the hands of the bands and labels, and potentially opens the floodgates for having thousands of songs in the Rock Band Store!

The program hasn’t started yet, but you can sign up for the beta at creators.rockband.com, and browse the spec to see how it works:

Mix your multi track recordings
You will need to mix them to fit the standards for Rock Band.

Create MIDI gameplay info
Reaper is a Digital Audio Workstation. We have been working with Reaper’s creators (Cockos, Inc.) to add a number of specific Rock Band Network additions that will make creating MIDI song information simpler and more intuitive. http://www.reaper.fm

Create a song package with Magma
Magma is a PC tool that we are creating to allow authors to build Rock Band Network song packages.

Audition your song package within Rock Band 2.2
We will release a patch to Rock Band 2 that will enable “Audition Mode.” This will allow you to test out your song packages in game with features like speed up and slow down cheats and autoplay.

Upload to creators.rockband.com for Peer Review
Once your song is ready, upload it here. Other members of the community will try out your song, give you feedback, and submit reviews. Once your song has passed the review process, it is automatically approved for sale on Xbox Live.

Sell your song on Xbox Live
When the store opens, later this year, songs will be available for others to download via the RBN store ingame.

Rock Band is the MTV of this generation, and the Rock Band Network is arguably the most definitive step in that direction yet.

This is about real bands, getting real music, to real fans.

Shared love of music: that’s what fake plastic rock is all about — and nobody seems to understand that better than Harmonix. Can’t wait to see what happens, and I plan to support the heck out of this with lots of song purchases.