There have been at least three new tracks each and every week since Rock Band’s original release in November of last year. Sometimes more. That means by now there are literally hundreds of downloadable tracks available now for Rock Band. 235, to be exact.

But which downloadable tracks are the most popular?

MTV and Harmonix don’t release those numbers, but a recent Viacom shareholder call gives some overall hints:

Rock Band: It’s the key driver of Media Networks growth, and Dauman predicted the franchise would start seriously contributing to the bottom line very soon. The game is still in the infancy of its lifecycle, he argued, noting the opportunity to expand geographically, and into new genres. So far, the title has sold 4.8 million copies, led to 18 million paid song downloads, and books another 1 million paid downloads every nine days. Right now, the hit game is still seen a drag on margins (a very welcome drag, of course), since the revenue comes in the form of low-margin hardware. But this is expected to change, and expected to double off of the single digits over the coming years, as revenue comes more from downloads.

Even though numbers aren’t available, dlcstats appears to track the popularity of downloadable songs for Rock Band.

How do they do that, with no real numbers available? They count the number of guitar scores in the online leaderboard for each track. It’s a highly imperfect method of data collection — what about people that buy DLC and play only vocals or drums? What about people who buy DLC but don’t bother participating in the online leaderboards? How do you factor in cheaper or free songs? Also, the online leaderboards only show the top 100,000 scores, so stats can’t be accurately tracked for extremely popular songs.

It is (barely) better than nothing, and it should be somewhat reliable in tracking the overall popularity of tracks — though it will probably skew a bit towards tracks guitar players find the most enjoyable.

• Browse the Rock Band DLC Statosphere for Xbox 360
• Browse the Rock Band DLC Statosphere for Playstation 3

At the time of writing, the most popular Rock Band DLC tracks are, in no particular order:

• Fortunate Son (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
• Juke Box Hero (Foreigner)
• Metallica Pack (Blackened, Ride the Lightning, And Justice For All)
• Roxanne (Police)
• Buddy Holly (Weezer)
• The Kill (30 Seconds to Mars)
• Dirty Little Secret (All American Rejects)
• Move Along (All American Rejects)
• All The Small Things (Blink 182)
• Wonderwall (Oasis)
• More Than a Feeling (Boston)

These songs have all hit the 100,000 recorded guitar score cap. As you might expect, it’s heavily slanted towards songs that have been out a while.

The least popular tracks are:

1. Doolittle Album (Pixies)
2. The Mother Hips
3. Cherry Bomb (Runaways)

I can see the Pixies album not being popular with guitarists, but it’s still a damn shame. Many rock critics would put Doolittle solidly in the best 100 albums of all time.

At least pick up Debaser, Here Comes Your Man, and Monkey Gone to Heaven!

And that Runaways track is great fun to play on all instruments, as well as being a classic girl band punk rock song.

Joan Jett and Lita Ford were in the Runaways. Go buy it!

Mike Patton, of the band Faith No More (and many others) was recently intervewed by the Onion’s A.V. Club, and he talked a bit about Rock Band:

AVC: Faith No More appeared in Rock Band. Do you have any kind of input on those kind of decisions when you’re picked for a game like that?

MP: Well, if we do, I certainly didn’t know about it. I didn’t know about it until it was in the game. Some friends told me.

AVC: So it’s one of those situations where the label’s just making these deals and they don’t even check with you guys.

MP: Yeah, when you’re on a major, basically they own the music and they can kind of farm it out however they want. And I do think there was probably a courtesy call or something like that at some point in the process, but I wasn’t involved in it. You learn very early on just to step back and put your hands up and say, “Whatever, whatever.” There’s nothing I can do.

AVC: Would you have picked a different song to be in Rock Band?

MP: No, it doesn’t matter to me. I had no agendas in that regard. I mean I’m glad they used anything in the first place. Fine by me.

AVC: Many regard music games as kind of silly. Do you see the appeal of those kinds of games?

MP: Sure. It’s hard not to. Any idiot, any stockbroker can get out there and live out a fantasy and pretend like he’s playing music. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I just recently did an interview with a videogame magazine in which I walked into the room and they had a whole Rock Band set-up and wanted me to play. I’d never really done that. And I realized how un-musical it really is. You play that guitar or that bass, and it has nothing to do with music. But nonetheless, it was pretty fun. It made me wonder if, at some point down the line, you could compose that way, because there’s obviously a whole generation of kids who have grown up on these games and using that method to make music. What if you weren’t just doing it for karaoke? If I was 11 years old and I wanted to start a band using that technology, with screens and that weird push-button, press the X here… It just made me wonder if there’s a whole generation of kids who couldn’t do something like that.

AVC: MPC samplers would make great videogame controllers. They could translate directly into that kind of gameplay.

MP: Absolutely. All it is is pressing a pad here and there. I mean this guy’s making music on the fucking iPhone now. There’s these programs if you jail-break your iPhone where you can use drum machine programs, all this kind of stuff. I don’t know what this stuff sounds like, but the idea definitely hits me in the geek nerve, and I love it.

AVC: Eventually there’s going to be that kid who learned to play drums because he played Rock Band.

MP: Yeah, absolutely. But there should be a way for him to actually not just play a Led Zeppelin song, to make music doing that.

AVC: Guitar Hero IV, the new game, is going to integrate some kind of music creation tool.

MP: I knew it. It had to happen. I’m all for it, man. I think it’s great. I am no one to be a purist. I didn’t go to school to learn how to do this. I taught myself. If these kids are teaching themselves by looking at a TV or doing it through a videogame, yeah, it’s pretty sick, but who am I to argue? If someone can do something creative with it, I’d buy it in a second. I mean, would you go see a band of 10 year old kids playing original music on Rock Band? I would. I’m not saying I’ll like it, but I definitely would go see it.

Maybe I’m just naive, but I had no idea that artists had so little control over their music! Does Mike even get any royalties at all from his song appearing in Rock Band?

Here’s a short video of Rush playing their own song, Tom Sawyer, in Rock Band.

I was impressed that they made it to 31% on expert.

There’s great new interview at the Onion AV club which covers Harmonix’ design philosophy in rhythm games. A few highlights:

On teaching people to hear music differently:

You can go to a really great sandwich shop and you can order an amazing sandwich and it just has one big name, and you eat it, and it’s great. But maybe you didn’t taste that they’d layered the prosciutto on top of the mozzarella with this special mayonnaise or whatever. You aren’t tasting every individual element of the sandwich. You’re eating the sandwich and it’s a great sandwich. There are a lot of people who turn on a song, and it’s a song. And they couldn’t tell you what the bass player’s playing, versus what the guitar player’s playing, versus the synthesizer in the background, or any of those elements. They just hear a song, in the way that you might eat a sandwich. And playing this game does a really easy trick, which is deciding that the success of one event determines the muting of one track. It equates two things which are actually not equal, and does this great trick to your brain which is hugely pleasurable, and educates you in a way by pulling [the track] away. It’s this simple, “One of these things is not like the other.” And then you all of a sudden have this knowledge that with a lot of other people would take them two or three years playing in a band to figure out. And bang, it’s there right in front of you.

How rhythm games are becoming a way for new bands to get heard:

We’ve always been thinking about [giving indie bands exposure]. And that is something that we really want to do, and [we've] started actually a few things that we can’t talk about, to make an avenue for indie bands to get their music heard through Rock Band. Because it’s so tough for them to get heard through the major record labels. So we’re thinking about that and seriously pursuing that.

This is particularly true with DLC, and I wish there was more of it. Although they really should release more at the 99 cent price range for new bands; pricing tracks from new bands at the same $1.99 as established classic acts is not helping anyone.

On adding new instruments, in particular keyboards:

We talked about keyboards a lot. I don’t think it’s actually what we need to add right now. I don’t think there are that many songs that are going to have interesting keyboards all the way through, that are going to warrant a new piece of hardware, or learning a new thing. That would be kind of tricky, teaching people to play with two hands. So I don’t know, that’s not something I would actually push for. Every year we talk about it, and one of these years it could pop up.

I think keyboards would be really tough to integrate; not only is it fairly limiting in terms of song choice, imagine how complex the controller would have to be. Certainly 5 or 6 inputs wouldn’t even begin to cover it!

Many other great insights in the interview; I highly recommend reading it.

This one’s fairly self explanatory.

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on Rock Band drums:

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on real drums:

Very cool to see how the in-game drum pattern correlates to play on real drums!

After looking at the note pattern, and playing this song on Hard drums all too often, I think it’s true what they say this song is actually harder on hard, due to the odd way they drop drum hits to make it “easier”!

He has some other real world drumkit Rock Band videos, and they’re all fun as heck to watch:

1. Foreplay/Longtime (Boston)
2. Sick, Sick, Sick (Queens of the Stone Age)
3. Buddy Holly (Weezer)