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The February 2008 issue of OXM was a pleasant gift to the subscribers and readership of the 360 centric periodical, containing three Rock Band tracks, supposedly exclusive to the magazine. The tracks, including Bang Camaro, Freezepop and Count Zero tunes, were expected to be an only-in-the-mag kind of thing, but this week will see the release of the three songs on Xbox Live Marketplace, and eventually the PSN.

OXM’s exclusivity was limited to a short span of time, as addressed by the mag’s EIC Francesca Reyes yesterday, so the Internet is naturally in an uproar. Really though, anyone who would want the tracks would have picked up the magazine, and those who missed out on the opportunity to pick up on the months-gone issue now have a chance to snag the rockin’ tuneage. No one loses this way, but forums and comment sections all over the expansive Intertron are exploding in furious resent.

Keep your cool kids, the music can be yours at regular price this week, but if you’ve got that demo disc for Official Xbox Magazine’s February edition lying around, you’ve already got ‘em. This is the gaming business, and that’s exactly what it is: a business. Harmonix will make money any way they can, and if the answer is more DLC then who are we to complain, regardless of where it comes from?

If you want to read Ms. Reyes’ response to the “fiasco”, hit up the text after the break.

Official Xbox Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Francesca Reyes - From the OXM Forums

Hey guys:

Just a word of note — those tracks that were on our February issue for Rock Band were guaranteed exclusively for us for a certain amount of unspecified time. We usually do this with specific demos, but for the RB tracks, the length of exclusivity was undetermined other than that we would have them for the duration the February issue was on newsstand and then some. We try to make these deals in order to reward our subscribers with new content first (and hopefully exclusively for a good amount of time) to show that we appreciate your support.

But ultimately, when there’s content to be had,  you can’t blame a developer/publisher for wanting to capitalize on it. In the case of Harmonix, these guys are putting out new tracks EVERY week (whether it’s one track or six — in the case of the Grateful Dead pack, etc.) and they have to actually program the game to work with new content each of those weeks. They have to put a good amount of work into each track they output every week, so it’s incorrect to think of them as being lazy. But, now that our February has been off sale for three months or so — it was apparently decided that our subscribers and newsstand readers were able to get the jump on leaderboards, etc. well enough in advance.

It was never our intention to misinform any of you into thinking that those RB tracks were indefinitely exclusive to OXM — we just didn’t know exactly when they would go up on Marketplace or if they actually would, seeing that there’s already so much content slated to be up there for RB. But, stuff like this serves as a good lesson for us and we’ll try to keep you all much more aware about things like this in the future. Thanks for bearing with us.