The Rock Band Network Store was publicly available on March 4, 2010 for all Xbox 360 players in selected countries (US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Singapore).

The Network has been considered a more favorable option for the addition of user-generated content for music games than compared to Activision's previous attempt with "GHTunes" for the Guitar Hero series.

[3] The service was fully closed in September 2017 as Harmonix moved forward with other projects, and all of its songs were removed from the DLC store in February 2018.

Eran Egozy, co-founder of Harmonix, noted that "We're changing the way the music industry is working, and we're hoping there's going to be this big community around it".

[7] Rigopulos also stated that creating music in a form that is ready to be used in Rock Band is "just part of what they do now", and considers the Network an attractive way to allow artists and labels to skip the Harmonix middleman in getting tracks to players.

[13][14] Harmonix provided training classes on the Rock Band Network tools and promotion at the September 2009 GameSoundCon Conference in Los Angeles.

[23] Harmonix also noted that legal discussions on the addition of user-generated content added several months to the release of the Network.

Approximately half of the tracks played in the Network's demo mode are subsequently bought by the players, representing an "organic growth" of the service, according to Harmonix' Jeff Marshall.

[26] Songs from the Network will continue to work in Rock Band 3, and will be treated as regular downloadable content across all modes of the game.

Other changes include improved authoring tools for creators, and better control of audition sessions for reviewers to better evaluate a song.

[30] On September 3, 2010, Harmonix announced the first nine Rock Band Network tracks for the Wii, but gave no release date, simply stating they were "coming soon".

[16] Following this, Harmonix' "Magma" program, so named jokingly as magma is the source of "rock",[33] is used to convert the song and note track information into a Rock Band playable song, and attempts to create reasonable animation sequences based on this information, such as having the camera focus on the guitarist during a solo.

Only two aspects of the performance cannot be modified by the editor: they cannot change the lip-synching of the vocalists, and they cannot control the activation of the fog machine peripheral for the game.

[23] They also found the community was supportive of allowing creative mixes for a song that would otherwise not be in Rock Band, such as using the vocal part of a track to match to the melody of a saxophone for a jazz piece.

[23] However, Nordhaus and Epps noted that users have also found ways to bypass some of the content-restrictions on the authoring process, such as the generation of images of swastikas or male genitalia within the note-tracks themselves, and there is reliance on the community to catch and remove these before release.

[23] Artists must have publishing rights for songs they release through the Rock Band Network, thus limiting the use of covers or remixes.

[39] Boston independent band the Bon Savants created a series of blog video posts demonstrating and explaining the steps in authoring a song into the Network.

[13][41] WaveGroup Sound also confirmed that they will be releasing several songs from artists such as Reverend Horton Heat, Steve Vai and Widespread Panic.

[42] Umphrey's McGee has also announced plans for several songs on the Rock Band Network including the tracks "1348" and "Miss Tinkles Overture".

[16] One label, Sub Pop, has revealed they will plan to release all songs and albums on their label to the Rock Band Network, including early music by Nirvana, Mudhoney, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service and The Shins, though the amount and rate of content will be affected by the difficulty of the tools Harmonix will provide to make the music tracks.

[46] On April 30, 2010, Rhythm Authors announced that they were partnered with Sumerian Records to bring the label's music to the Rock Band Network; so far Asking Alexandria, Veil of Maya and After the Burial are confirmed to be in production.

[51] Devin Townsend has been confirmed to be adding the entirety of his Ziltoid the Omniscient album to the Rock Band Network over the course of 2011.