Remember when you got Rock Band? Remember how you created your imaginary bands with tender love and care, naming them with the most creative moniker you could come up with?

My band, whose name cannot be printed here, may have broken up (it was a really long, arduous and heartbreaking experience that involved an incident with cottage cheese and sour cream) but if it was still around, it would be thrilled to hear — as I hope you will be — that the open beta of the Rock Band Network rolled out yesterday, and thanks to its introduction, users can upload their own tracks!

Now, don’t get to excited here. Sorry to suck you in and trick you like that, but the Network comes with a few stipulations.

First, it’s going to cost money. Quite a chunk of money, actually.

With no option for a cheaper, less time-committal alternative, it will cost $99 per year. This comes on top of a yearly subscription to Xbox Live, so you’re looking at an annual cost of roughly $150 at minimum.

Second, as you may have surmised by that mention of Xbox Live, this will only work on Microsoft’s console. There’s nothing wrong with PlayStation 3 versions of the game or the console itself, but this whole operation is being run through the XNA Creator’s Club, Microsoft’s development platform utilized by indie game creators and small budget studios.

Third, you’ll need a PC, and you’ll need to download some specialty software to author these custom tracks.

It’s great that such software is becoming available to the masses, but this isn’t exactly an easy or uncomplicated process, which leads to…

Fourth — and take this as both a negative and positive — this isn’t exactly YouTube. Joe and Jenny Schmoe may be able to review and sample tracks, but the people creating the tracks are going to be dedicated bands with (I imagine) a proper recording studio, training in the full array of instruments and vocals, a relatively large amount of spending money and time to do all the work.

 It’s a lot to ask of an artist to put his or her work out to the masses. It’s even more to ask him or her to volunteer craft with little promise of exposure or monetary reward.

This really is a brilliant move for Harmonix; broadening its horizons, opening the pearly gates to its musical kingdom and turning its intellectual property into a potential cash-cow reminiscent of a beneficial symbiotic organism. If the symbiote was screaming Lynard Skynard and filling your veins with liquid money, mind you.

In the end though, you have to wonder if this is really going to pay off. Can Harmonix sell this thing, or are we going to have to wait for a full-fledged Rock Band sequel before it really takes off?

Even then, I have to wonder if the music/rhythm genre has been so saturated at this point that it’ll matter. Combine this with the stipulations attached to the Network listed above, and you have a recipe.

A recipe for … I don’t know … Something? 

This column appears courtesy of Sophie Prell’s blog, “G3 — A Girl’s Guide to Gaming.”

Sophie Prell is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Alta.