Rock Band - the new age simulation game?

I was doing my daily surf at Penny-arcade when i saw the link to this interesting piece of news. LINK

Summary:

Harmonix, EA & MTV are teaming up to bring us Rock Band on 360 & PS3. Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos: " Rock Band takes the core premise of Guitar Hero and expands it tenfold. It lets you create a complete collaborative band."

For those who have no idea what this is about, just try to recall the game DANCE DANCE revloution, basically guitar hero/rock band is like DDR except you play a guitar and not on some dance pad. I used to play DDR pretty well myself, destroying 3 dance pads practicing at home. (DUN LAUGH!!!)

Basically in guitar hero, you can only play as the guitarist, but for rock band we have bass, lead, drums and singer (I have no idea how they are going to do the singer part), and interestingly the game can be played online so that means your "band" can be international.

Another part about the news that intrigued me was that some record companies were thinking of releasing new songs via this game rather then by traditional means, now that is an interesting marketing concept, especially if the game does take off and gets tons of users. Instead of people hearing it on the radio or TV, they will get to try it out and SING it on the game, that would really be an interesting way to market a new song or album.