We Can Fix That with Data

In addition to your friends’ scores, Rock Band song leaderboards provide some interesting business data.

Every time you play a song in Rock Band while connected to Xbox Live, your score is applied to the song’s leaderboard. What’s interesting about that is that the number of entries on the leaderboard can tell us how many users have played the song. And what’s interesting about that is that it tells us how many users have purchased the song, if it was downloadable content. (Not counting people that purchased the song and never played it, and not counting if the users-played count is over 100k because the leaderboards don’t go that far, but hey.)

Rock Band DLC Statosphere adds it all up.

skedastic of the Qt3 boards massaged the numbers a bit to remove time factors and to group by artist. There’s some debate in the thread over his statistical methods. I would like to debate because Rush and Nine Inch Nails are relatively low, and goddammit, I want more Rush and Nine Inch Nails.

Am I not getting more Rush and Nine Inch Nails because the team can see that they’re poor investments? I don’t know, but I haven’t seen any patterns in the DLC releases that would imply they’re trying to provide more songs by proven bands — yet. I wonder what their lead time and content production pipelines look like. Is it harder to get assets out of studio musicians than it is artists?