The Guitar Hero and Rock Band series have earned more than $2 billion to date. That’s hundreds of millions of plastic drum kits and guitars cluttering dorms, frat houses and living rooms across the world, which most likely annoys the shit out of local musicians and bands everywhere. After all, there’s a perception that these games denigrate the actual creation of music by reducing it to pressing five different coloured buttons. That perception is going to change, because now those same musicians and bands can get a cut of the action.

After creating the Guitar Hero series and then moving on to start the Rock Band franchise, Harmonix democratized the rhythm music video game last week with the announcement of the Rock Band Network. It’s a way for artists, regardless of genre affiliations, to get their music into the game without dealing with the usual bureaucracy.

It works like this: You go to www.rockband.com/rock-band-network and download the programming tools (pricing on the tools has yet to be revealed), which you can use to transform your song into a Rock Band compatible track. After submitting them to Harmonix, the songs will be peer-reviewed for any copyright infringement or objectionable material and then released for download to be played in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. Musicians and bands set their own price point (between 40 cents and $3) and receive 30 per cent of the revenue from track sales.

It’s an elegant system designed to prevent the deluge of Nintendo and Insane Clown Posse covers while still giving artists a lot of control in how their music is presented. More importantly, an initiative like this opens up all sorts of opportunities for bands looking to expand their audiences. Even before the Network was announced, more than 40 million individual tracks had been purchased and downloaded from the Rock Band game store.

The impact of these games isn’t easily ignored. Supposedly, Aerosmith made more money on its version of Guitar Hero than on any of its albums. The Beatles: Rock Band, scheduled for release this September, is expected to help pull the video game industry from its recession lull. And now that potential, though perhaps not at that scale, will be available to every Hot Little Rocket, every The Dudes, every Dragon Fli Empire. So, at least as an artist, when your neighbours are slapping multicoloured keys in their Fischer Price Rock ’n’ Roll fantasy at 3 a.m., they’ll be keeping you up to your own music.