Harmonix clarifies the '5000 Rock Band songs' rumor @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on January 30, 2009

News: News flash: 5,000 songs will NOT be released in 2009.

It looks like Rock Band's song catalog will not be ballooning to 5,000 songs anytime soon. A few days ago, Billboard reported that an "MTV spokesman" confirmed that the Rock Band Store would expand from 500 to 5,000 songs in 2009. Unsurprisingly, that is not even close to the reality of the situation.

The "5,000" number stems from a January 15, 2009 interview between Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos and technology blog Ars Technica. In the interview, Rigopulos talked about the future of the Rock Band Store and what would happen as it grew to 5,000 songs and beyond. He did not say that all of that growth would happen this year:

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. With the critical mass of the "rock" core covered, of course we'll keep expanding it, but the critical mass is covered, so now we can start to branch off in ways that haven't made sense in the past but will make sense moving forward.

Ah well, you knew it was too good to be true.