Today marks the completion of my comprehensive collection of Rock Band content.  Until today, I have been purchasing every single song released for the Rock Band platform, from Country to Death Metal, deep album cuts to pop hits, Manson to Spongebob.

The experience has been wonderful.  For the majority of two years, our band Big Endian (and before that, Little Endian) has celebrated Rock Band Tuesday, where we’d play the new content weekly to much fanfare and critical evaluation.  But times change and so must our habits.

It’s been quite some time since Big Endian has played together.  Online play just hasn’t been compelling enough to “keep the band together” remotely, and most of my Rock Band Tuesday purchases have been single player experiences lately.  As such, the marginal value of the weekly expense has been deteriorating.  I’ve been looking for a reason (excuse?) to end my weekly purchases in a satisfactory way that provides some closure for the experience.

Today it arrived, with the launch of the new Rock Band Network store.  In an absolutely brilliant move, Harmonix has opened the Rock Band platform to a potentially unlimited supply of content creators and even on the first day of launch, over 100 songs are available!  This is awesome, but it does have an element of bell tolling.

Rock Band has matured past the “traditional” downloadable content model for games.  Instead of a relative trickle of content that marginally improves the game each week, now the Rock Band platform resembles more of a traditional music store or even iTunes.  And, of course, even the most ardent lover of music doesn’t try to buy everything that’s available on iTunes.  An era has ended, and a new one has begun.

I don’t mean to imply that I have no interest in buying more music for Rock Band.  On the contrary, there are many songs on the Rock Band Network that look absolutely amazing.  But I’ll no longer be collecting all of it, instead I’ll just be cherry picking songs as my interest demands.  (I might buy less, after all, I do have hundreds of songs already, it’s not like I’m having trouble finding things to play.)

And so today I draw the line.  I have a complete collection of the first era of Rock Band downloadable content.  From the very first day of release, until the very first day that the Rock Band Network brought content creation to the masses, I’ve got them all, and I’m very satisfied.