While Viacom, the owner of Harmonix's Rock Band game series, has been vocal in touting impressive sales numbers for the hit music title, what seemed to have been completely glanced over was a recent report by Credit Suisse which indicates that the game series simply has not been profitable since day one.

John Master Lee via www.thekartel.com »

"Looking at music games as part of our NPD analysis, Gamasutra has discovered that U.S. Guitar Hero/Rock Band revenues are down 49% year on year, as discounted hardware and over 20 SKUs flood the market.

June 2009 was the second consecutive month without a Rock Band or Guitar Hero title in the top 20 software titles. The last time the software charts went two months without one of these franchises was in September and October 2007, right before the launch of Guitar Hero II on the PlayStatio..."

Fury via gamasutra.com »

"Rock Band owners currently have upwards of 600 songs to choose from, counting all of the songs in Rock Band, Rock Band 2, the AC/DC disc, and all of the DLC.

According to Billboard, now MTV has said that they hope to have 5000 songs available for Rock Band by year's end.

5,000!

Now while this may seem like an extraordinary number of songs, they may be trying to gauge the future of music distribution.

Being able to choose from such a huge catalogue, and not just from the 3-6 songs,..."

PacoDG via consolehero.com »