Harmonix's reached a milestone of 500 downloadable tracks available for Rock Band thanks to a baker's dozen of No Doubt hits. Impressive, eh? Can it possibly reach 5,000 this year? MTV thinks it might.
According to a report from Billboard, the owner of Harmonix says "as many as 5,000" songs could be available for download. You're right. That is insane. Surely it's a misprint. Heh, right Billboard?
Not necessarily. Just don't count on it.
One Harmonix rep responded to the claims that the Rock Band catalog would increase tenfold by saying "'As many as 5,000' is not a guarantee, but it sounds nice, doesn't it? [It's] not totally outside the realm of possibility either. Remember when people said that we'd never see 500 tracks by the end of 2008?"
I don't remember saying that, but for arguments sake, let's say I did. Now I'll say that you'll never reach 5,000 tracks by 2010. Now, we wait patiently for me to be gloriously wrong.
Thanks for the heads up, Noble!
Update: Looks like Billboard interpreted a quote from Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos very liberally. Rigopulos recently told Ars Technica: "That said, one of the great promises of the catalog moving forward, as the catalog expands from 500 songs to 5,000 songs or whatever in the coming years, is that we're going to be less constrained from a genre standpoint, and I think you will see us starting to branch out into... whether it's country or R&B and jazz or funk, or things of that sort."
Looks like I'm right again! Huzzah!
Music, video-game industries continue to harmonize [Yahoo!/Billboard]