The chance that the newly announced Rock Band Network will be a success just went up. The service—which piggybacks off of Microsoft’s XNA Creators Club—allows musicians to create their own playable Rock Band tracks, upload them to the store, and make money off of them. Just don’t confuse it with the DOA music creation mode in last year’s Guitar Hero: World Tour. World Tour‘s effort crumbled under a complex toolset and the inability to include vocals with your uploaded tracks.

While making songs for Rock Band will be no less complicated, the potential is enormous for indie and upcoming bands to take their music to the people in a more direct and interactive way. If that potential doesn’t excite you, consider this: it excites A&R executive Tony Kiewel, from powerhouse indie label Sub Pop, who tells Rolling Stone (one of the world’s most trusted video game news magazines) that he’d like to see the label’s entire catalog, past and future, made available through the Rock Band Network. In fact, he says they’re already investing in the equipment necessary to make that happen. That would mean full album releases for bands like Nirvana, The Shins, The Postal Service, and Blitzen Trapper. Even comedy music duo Flight of the Conchords could see their songs make the leap.

Considering the Rock Band Network announcement is barely a week old, and there are no tracks coded or available for it yet, we’ll have to see if the service lives up to its potential (possibly doing for music games what iTunes did for digital music). Still, it’s hard not to be excited when Kiewel says things like “This’ll be a ‘release’ as far as I’m concerned. This’ll be another format alongside vinyl and CD.” That kind of attitude could change the landscape of the sagging music game market. How cool would it be to be able to pick up the newest Shins album on the day it’s released as an mp3 download and Rock Band track pack? At the very least, it means fans could get more of what they want (songs) instead of what they don’t (more plastic instruments). Maybe MTV wasn’t so crazy when it said Rock Band was going to be not just a game, but a “platform.”