by:Marcus Yam
Judas Priest's "Screaming For Vengeance" to be completely in Rock Band
Furthering its claim of being just as much of a music platform as it is a videogame, Harmonix and MTV Games today announced that Judas Priest’s 1982 classic, Screaming For Vengeance will be the first complete album to be added to the Rock Band downloadable content catalog, slated to hit April 22 on Xbox Live Marketplace and April 24 on the PlayStation Store.
Each track will be available for $1.99 per track (160 Microsoft Points) or $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points) for the album. The complete tracklist may be found on the official website.
Full album releases were promised by Harmonix before Rock Band even hit the market, but it has taken five months before the first release. Harmonix's CEO Alex Rigopulos told Kotaku in an interview, “...a big reason that it's taken us so long to get them to market is that the actual technical delivery of the assets required for any one song - they're actually pretty complicated. You're often dealing with masters for the older stuff that were recorded on analog. Often it takes a long time to even locate those masters. The right takes and the right edits have to be found, and in some cases old gear that's not in use anymore has to be resuscitated to transfer the stuff to digital.”
While $1.99 is the standard price for songs, the $14.99 price isn’t the standard one for albums. “There's not going to be a standard album pricing. It's going to be a function of how many songs are included in the album...essentially there will be a volume discount applied,” explained Rigopulos.
Harmonix also revealed that the next full album to be released in May will be the self-titled album from The Cars , with The Pixies' Doolittle to hit in June.
