Judas Priest Bring Metal to Rock Band

After Motley Crue announced that they would release their Saints of Los Angeles single through Rock Band and after Def Leppard said that they would launch their new single through Guitar Hero on April 24, Judas Priest went one better in agreeing to release an entire album, long play, on Rock Band.

Harmonix and MTV Games have announced that they came to an agreement with the veteran rockers regarding their "Screaming for Vengeance" album. It will be available, on both the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store, as a set of DLC tracks that will be fully playable using Rock Band.

"Screaming for Vengeance" will make its first appearance on the Microsoft powered Xbox Live Marketplace. Individual tracks selling will be sold for the price of 1.99 dollars of 160 Microsoft Points each, while the whole album will go for 14.99 dollars or 1200 Microsoft Points. The date is set to be April 22, with the album also making its way to the PlayStation Store two days after, on April 24.

Harmonix seems to think that full albums of Rock Band playable songs are much more interesting to the gamer than releases of singles, so it plans to add even more album releases to its library of songs.
The Cars‘ "The Cars" will be ready for download sometime in May while "Doolittle" from the Pixies will be coming to Rock Band in June. There's no word on prices yet.

Downloading songs for the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a fast growing business for both Harmonix and Activision. It's estimated that around 6 million songs were downloaded for Rock Band alone since the game launched in November 2007. Around 80 songs are up for download and Harmonix, the developers of the game, are hard at work adding new and new songs.

Such downloadable content that integrates smoothly into a solid gameplay foundation can create long lasting and significant revenue streams for any game company, and exclusive releases like that of Motley Crue can only enhance the image of the service and the game. Artist are eager to get their works to their fans as quickly as possible, while game creators are more than happy to offer their fans the music that they listen to in game playable form.

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