Jul 26
How Popular Are Downloadable Songs?
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:
- Doolittle Album (Pixies)
- The Mother Hips
- 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!

