Rock Band Network: Marketing Tool or Moneymaker?

This...

Attention Bands, Studios, and Labels:
Create. Play. Get Paid.
The Rock Band Network is Coming.

Coming Soon - Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase

Is just awesome.

It's interesting that they took the route of offering a cut of track purchases, when they could just as easily have claimed that tracks serve as a promotional tool for sales of the tracks on iTunes, etc, which they are.

Either way, its cool to see. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. In addition to laying out tracks, if music artists could add new character choreography, awards, avatar costumes, maybe involve fans in doing different RB track layouts and picking the best ones, etc.

It'll also be interesting if one of the 'doing RB tracks as money makers' and 'doing RB tracks as marketing tools for the music' intents becomes dominant.