SteveStreeting.com

When Harmonix promised at E3 that 500 songs would be in Rock Band by the end of 2008, that seemed an awfully ambitious number. But over the past few months the DLC release schedule has been going nuts, including many full-album releases, such as the very welcome The Colour and the Shape, and the not so welcome (in our house anyway) Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? .

So it seems that 500 songs wasn’t so much of a challenge after all – as of right now, according to rockbandcontent.com, they’re already over 500 and as of next week, with the release of 13 tracks from No Doubt – The Singles 1992-2003, the total number of tracks will rise to 515. That’s pretty damn impressive – and they still have 3 more weeks to go after that before their target deadline.

Obviously since tastes vary, very few people will have actually bought every track, but the huge choice available means even when cherry-picking you can build a seriously big library; we’re up to 234 now and still counting; I expect we’ll probably be at 250 by Christmas. For this kind of game this is definitely the way to go – forget disc releases, or when they do happen, at a minimum they should be seamlessly integrated into a single game experience, like how you can convert the Rock Band 1 & AC/DC tracks into DLC to play in Rock Band 2. I don’t want to mess about switching games, or even just swapping physical media (like the on-the-fly disc swapping in Singstar), I just want to fire up one game and be able to pick from one great big unified list instantly. Now that I have this facility, I just couldn’t accept anything less. It’s exactly why digital music players worked so well, and it’s a perfect fit for a music game too.

And yet somehow there are still bands (‘dinosaur bands’ as Dave Mustaine referred to them) that think getting into downloadable content, whether iTunes or game content, is not for them. Some are paranoid about it, some seem to think they’re ‘above’ it. More fool them.

Some stats at 9th December:

• 515 tracks available
• 240 artists
• 9 full albums
• Over 28 million tracks purchased

More please.