What's a fast way to choose which new songs to download for Rock Band?

December 14, 2013 7:45 PM

My sister and I are big fans of the Rock Band video game on XBox. They seem to be winding up the franchise though and we want to download a whack of new songs while we still can. We've already downloaded songs we know and love already. The dilemma is what to get next. It would take forever to go through the list and listen to each song. Is there a better way of narrowing down the choices? Is there some rating system we could consult online that could tell us which songs are at least more popular than others? Our musical interests are all over the place which makes things tougher. We like Creedence Clearwater, Pearl Jam, Sting, The Who, Bob Dylan, Queen... but as you can see these are older bands. We don't know much about the newer bands but we've liked Dover, Amy Winehouse, Stone Temple Pilots....
posted by storybored to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (7 answers total)

Which Rock Band? The easiest and probably cheapest way to get more Rock Band songs is to buy more Rock Band games. Lego Rock Band has some awesome songs, and all of the games except Beatles can be exported into Rock Band 3 for 5-10 bucks.

I know at some point there was a community site based around the game that had song ratings, but for the life of me I can't find it. There's this full listing of every Rock Band song, if you want to peruse the list.
posted by graventy at 9:13 AM on December 15, 2013

Response by poster: Graventy, thanks for that website! That's very useful and I see it has a list of top downloads. This will be a fine starting place. I already have Rock Band 1, 2, 3, Lego and the Beatles. Yeah, we're nuts about this game.
posted by storybored at 11:20 AM on December 15, 2013

I'd look into Rock Band Blitz too, which comes with 25 or so songs that work as RB3 songs. It's a 10/15 dollar downloadable, and a fairly fun game in itself.
posted by graventy at 12:03 PM on December 15, 2013

I can give you some firsthand recommendations -- I worked on downloadable Rock Band songs for a few years. Here are a few that I think are especially fun to play (you probably know a bunch already):

Blue Sky by The Allman Brothers Band
Fascination by Alphabeat
Nights on Broadway by The Bee Gees
Hitch a Ride by Boston
Dance Epidemic by Electric Six
Flathead by The Fratellis
Ashes to Fire by Ghost Hounds
Going Underground by The Jam
Funk #49 by James Gang
Spaceman by The Killers
White Falcon Fuzz by The Mother Hips
Excuse Me Mr. by No Doubt
Many Shades of Black by The Raconteurs
Nearly Lost You by Screaming Trees
Tie You Down by Shaimus
Love Spreads by The Stone Roses
I Wish by Stevie Wonder

Also, if you enjoy singing like I do, there are some karaoke standbys in there that people often miss (Total Eclipse of the Heart, Don't Stop Believing, etc).

Also also, the pre-Rock Band 3 songs are cheap in the store right now. They don't have keyboard or harmony parts, though.
posted by danb at 8:45 PM on December 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks Danb! You hit on a good point - the songs we like to listen to sometimes aren't the most fun to play :). We like the Talking Heads for instance, but boy, on Rock Band, they're borrrring. Then we discovered that the Creedence Clearwater songs were a blast even though we weren't big CCR fans to begin with.
posted by storybored at 5:10 PM on December 16, 2013

Response by poster: p.s. Danb, of those songs we only have Going Underground, which we love! Gonna check these out! If you got any others you want to pass on, please don't hesitate. (and those vid links are mucho appreciated)
posted by storybored at 5:13 PM on December 16, 2013

(Hey storybored -- check your MeFi Mail!)
posted by danb at 7:40 PM on December 23, 2013