We Be Drummin' has been going for just about a year now, reaching 41 weeks (accounting for breaks) of intense drum action last Thursday. As the drumming has gone on, I've seen a few people wondering: "Alex has to have played most of the songs in Rock Band by now, right? Surely he's getting close.", a question which led me to wonder: "Alex has to have played most of the songs in Rock Band by now, right? Surely he's getting close."
I found the question interesting, but it wasn't until I tried setting up Rock Band 3 on an emulator earlier this week that I remembered just how many DLC tracks that series had back in the day, and processed just how many it's added since. The emulator eventually refused to cooperate, and I remembered I don't exactly have any of the (currently highly expensive) plastic accessories to pair with it, so I gave up on that plan (playing drums on a computer keyboard seemed like it would be terrible for my wrist.) However, it made me revisit the question of just how much progress through the Rock Band tracklist has been made throughout these streams, and I started thinking through how to find an answer.
The Process
The first step in this inquiry was to get a complete list of every song that has ever been available for Rock Band. Turns out, no such thing really exists, at least not as a single list. Harmonix used to have a complete list but they removed it some time in 2015, replacing it with a fan-made list from rdbd.online. This is a pretty large list, but it hasn't been updated since some time last September, and seems to be missing some things here and there as well.
The most comprehensive list I could find turned out to be Wikipedia, which has pages listing the songs present in each game, as well as lists for Rock Band Network and the almost 2,000 DLC tracks that have released over the years. An evening's worth later of copying and pasting data into a google sheet, followed by trimming and formatting, and I had a seemingly cohesive list, at around 5,300 tracks. Only issue was, this included every release of every song, meaning songs that released as downloadable tracks as well as on-disc (such as Paramore's crushcrushcrush) showed up on the list twice, as well as songs which released on Rock Band Network and later received official releases (a somewhat common practice among the more recent DLC tracks for Rock Band 4.) There's no sense in having the same track count twice, whether for or against the total, so I culled any duplicate entries, but kept alternate versions (such as live tracks), bringing the list down to around 4,800. I kept only the most relevant categories that I could pick out, those being Song Name and Artist Name (of course), as well as Rock Band's genre definition (for Beatles and Green Day, no genre definition is given, so I went with the Rock Band descriptor that seemed most apt, Pop/Rock and Punk respectively, for every track from each game), which game the song originates from (disc releases were favored, in chronological order, followed by downloadable releases), and which pack (if any) a song originates from (not at all relevant for the main games, but worth noting for DLC tracks, as well as the track packs.) The sheet was later reconfigured to prioritize DLC tracks, due to RBN tracks being theoretically inaccessible.
Then came the task of actually running statistic analysis on 4,700 songs, something which is both impractical and realistically impossible to do by hand. Even if it were reasonable to do by hand, part of why Excel and Sheets are worth a damn is their ability to do all the heavy lifting, so I began thinking through how to write a formula to check which songs on the complete list had already appeared on WBD. Luckily for me, that list already exists thanks to the hard work of @marino, via the spreadsheet they've kept since week one. Without this, I would've had absolutely no hope of making it work, short of going back through all of the video archives and creating my own list. Follow that up with a lot of tinkering with custom formulae, looking stuff up, and consulting with a friend who's way smarter with this sort of stuff than I am, I eventually managed to hook the two lists up and cross-reference them, adding a check next to a song on the complete list if it's been played already, and a cross if they haven't been played already. It's a pretty small portion of the sheet, but that one formula may as well be the crux of this entire project. From there, all I had to do was hook up some simpler formulae to run various statistics, and I was off to the races.
Creating all the formulae was a bit of work, but with the way I've set them up it should mean future revisions to the sheet are incredibly easy, as newly added tracks are automatically included in each formula, and the checklist should automatically update off of Marino's main spreadsheet every week (without which, again, none of this would be possible.)
The Results
The spreadsheet, alongside a live progress tracker, can be viewed here.
Theoretically, it would be pretty easy to create any number of formulae off of this list to see the completion statistics for any field tracked, whether it's what percent of the Country Packs have been completed, or what percent of Classic Rock songs have been completed. That said, in the interest of simplicity I went with fourteen fields, one for each major release (mainline games, spin-offs, track packs), as well as Rock Band Network 1.0 as a whole, 2.0 as a whole, and all of the downloadable tracks outside of Network. As well, the final three classifications (and arguably the most important), I created a running total of how many unique songs existed compared to what's been played on stream, how many songs outside of RB Network have been played vs. what's accessible, as well as how many of the songs played on stream are considered "Reggae/Ska" by RB standards.
Currently, 24.43% of the entire Rock Band discography has been played on stream, but not including inaccessible tracks from RB Network, that percent gets bumped up to 38.83%. That percentage is impressive by itself, but even moreso when considering there's 2,969 to 4,737 unique tracks in Rock Band, it's downright impressive. Maybe not the highest percentage of the Rock Band discography anyone has ever played, but a downright feat by any measure, certainly. It's also worth noting that this is by no means a comprehensive list, as not only do some songs have no drum parts, but quite a few are entirely impossible to transfer into modern-day Rock Band, or even outside of their original games, and haven't seen downloadable rereleases. As well, discrepancies between spelling and formatting between the two lists means some songs which have been played may get passed over.
No game's tracklist has yet been drummed in full, although the closest is Rock Band 2 at 63.1%, while the furthest is Beatles Rock Band at 0% (no Beatles songs have been played at all on stream, since the only Beatles songs in the franchise are accessible in Beatles: Rock Band and nowhere else.)
While compiling the list, I found a few other interesting details, moreso related to the songs themselves than We Be Drummin'. For example, apparently a Giant Bomb fansong was once available as part of Rock Band Network 2.0. A number of "internet songs" appeared on RBN, including Lemon Demon's Brodyquest, Parry Gripp's Spaghetti Cat, and two different versions of that My Little Pony fansong made by an actual professional Eurobeat musician.
There were also some ridiculously long song and artist names, mostly from Rock Band Network. Even longer-titled mainline tracks like "Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows" (a mashup of two different Beatles songs) can't compete against titles like Giraffes? Giraffes! "I am S/H(im)e as You am S/H(im)e as You are Me and We am I and I are All Our Together", or Mega64's "My Name's Horatio, You Got Me, You Ain't Got Nobody Else, So Deal With It, And Love It", practically full sentences in their own right. While long track names and long artist names tended not to go hand-in-hand, the longest artist credit I could find was "MC Lars feat. MC Bat Commander and Suburban Legends", which, while long, accomplishes its length through combining three different names, unlike "Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives", the longest single artist name of the list.
Also, predictably, The Beatles (74) and Green Day (56) have had the most songs, given they got their own dedicated games. Following them is of course Queen (36), and then Amberian Dawn (34), a band which only ever released tracks through RB Network, and has not seen release anywhere else. Bringing up fifth is Foo Fighters, at 33. Most common song name is "Burn", at six entries, followed by "California", "Ride", and "Closer" all at four, and "Dreams" at three.
Over the past year, Alex has averaged roughly 26.75 songs a week, a pace which, if kept up, should see the Rock Band track list completed in 67.89 weeks, or approximately Fall 2022, assuming Harmonix continues a steady pace of 2 DLC tracks a week and doesn't release any new DLC packs. I'm going to take a brief moment of optimism to hope that maybe this whole Coronavirus thing is over by then. Hopefully.
EDIT: Originally, this blog used statistics which incorporated RB Network tracks as standard tracks, and prioritized them over DLC releases. This has been slightly reconfigured, since those tracks aren't easily accessible, and have been outright excluded by the rules of the stream except where they have been rereleased as DLC. Also, I originally failed to notice the DLC tracks for Beatles: RB, which were added in as well.
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