"When we launched Rock Band two years ago, we made a promise to create a music gaming experience that delivered on a weekly basis more songs and artists than ever imagined," said Alex Rigopulos, co-founder and CEO of Harmonix Music Systems. "We’re extremely proud to pass this remarkable milestone of over 1,000 songs in Rock Band and will continue to innovate and bring more of the best music to Rock Band players all over the world."
As anyone who follows music games knows, it's no small task getting both the licenses and the master tracks necessary to get previously released commercial music into a video game. "The library of great songs available to players on the Rock Band platform is vast and continues to grow," said Paul DeGooyer, Senior Vice President of Electronic Games and Music at MTV Networks Music Group. "This milestone reflects a tremendous amount of hard work from the world-class teams at Harmonix, MTV Games and at our artist, management, label and publishing partners."
Harmonix was able to achieve the 1000 song milestone by issuing several versions of Rock Band and offering new tracks via download every week for the last 105 consecutive weeks. The disc export feature, available on all Rock Band games with the exception of The Beatles: Rock Band, allows players to enjoy the vast variety of songs without having to constantly swap discs, as is the case with Guitar Hero and other music games.
With over 60 million song downloads, Rock Band is quickly becoming one of the most profitable video games of all time. The number of downloads is only expected to skyrocket when Harmonix releases the Rock Band Network, which will provide tools to bands and labels of all sorts to create downloadable Rock Band tracks out of their music and put them up for sale.
While not the only music game out there, the sheer variety of music available helps Rock Band stand out in what is becoming a very crowded genre of video games.
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