Rock Band Passes 100M Song Downloads

Music game developer Harmonix has revealed that it has hit a "significant milestone," as over 100 million songs have been downloaded across its Rock Band titles. Speaking to Game Informer, Chris Rigopulos, VP of strategy and business Development at Harmonix, said that the series is still seeing plenty of attention from players, with over 1 million unique users logging into Rock Band each month. "We recently hit a significant milestone; more than 100 million songs have been downloaded for Rock Band," he said. "Nearly 5 million accounts have downloaded a song from the Rock Band catalog." "With all of the negative press around the band genre, you might be surprised to learn that we still see more than a million unique users log on each month to play Rock Band and to pick up new music and it’s not the same million players each month." In October last year, Harmonix announced that it had crossed the 75 million-song download threshold. There are more than 2,700 songs available to download via Rock Band, with over 900 music artists featured. Rigopulos also mentioned Rock Band 4, noting that the game will not see a release in 2011. "Rock Band 3 is a big game with lots of available music content and lots of new goals and challenges, he said. "We want to give our fans the time to explore that fully." "But rest assured that Harmonix is still developing new ideas and concepts to advance the Rock Band franchise, and we look forward to sharing those when the time is right." Last week, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Viacom generated a tax benefit of approximately $115 million dollars with the sale of Harmonix.