How did Harmonix come about this specific list of songs for the Rock Band 2 disc?
Eric Brosious: We maintain an ongoing wish list of songs, plus we gather suggestions from within Harmonix and team at MTV (lots of strong and passionate opinions here) and we scour our newsgroups and forums, our own record collections, etc. We listen through and come up with a list of artists and songs we’d like either for RB2 or for DLC (online). As we get approvals we start to build the RB2 set list trying to put together a good balance of genres, decades, big hits vs. indies, difficulty vs. just plain fun, etc. As the list grows we swap songs around depending on what’s needed. The good thing is that we know we’ll release a song as DLC if we can’t find a slot for it on the disc. IGN: With the success of the first Rock Band, did you find artists were more open to having their songs in RB2? Brosious: Yes. We find that it’s sometimes hard to explain what the game is enough to get people interested. But once they see it, they get it. In general, artists were pretty excited about being in
