So Alex's drum marathon stream for Rock Band 4 and the realization that the ps4 guitar plus game bundle was half off made me finally plunge and buy a Rock Band game. Pretty excited for this purchase, I really have only played rock band a few times at friends houses. I played the original guitar heroes like crazy and also have the new guitar hero world tour for ps4 (its neat but overall the song catalog is not to my liking). That said, I also am a drummer and I have an electric kit with a midi out that should work with play station midi adapter. Naturally, I want to have as many songs as possible to play but seeing as how I have never played a Rock Band game last generation, I have no DLC tied to my account. So does anyone know what would be the best course of action to get the most songs to play with for as little money as possible?

You used to be able to export the songs from RB1, RB2, Lego Rock Band, etc. I don't think you can do that anymore. Thankfully they are starting to make some of those old songs available to buy again.

There are song packs which usually group a certain number of songs from one artist into one pack for a discounted price than buying them all separately.

The only place to buy them is the Rock Band marketplace itself really. If you want a lot of songs, be prepared to spend a lot...

Huh ok. Was hoping for a few more responses but I guess the only answer is to have a lot of money. Cool...I guess that's one of the few things guitar hero tv got right. A similar guitar hero mode where you can randomly play through any dlc song and the ability to rent the whole catalog for a night was either genius or just convinenet. Given the lack of success for guitar hero WT, it's probably just the latter.

If you haven't checked it out yet, Phase Shift is a decent Rock Band clone on PC and it has a number of lawful and legitimate creative commons-licensed tracks which are 100% approved for free internet download. No vocals, but you can use any MIDI-enabled instrument as a controller, which is nice. I have an electronic drum set I use and it's a really good experience.

Your best chance like I did is to buy a copy of RB3, put it in your PS3 and get a trophy and select the export pack in RB4. And just download every other song and song pack from the store. I have around 300 songs on it now, it's costing you a bunch of money but if it's your new hobby and you like music that it isn't a big deal.

@bonesyndicate: Cool suggestion. I'm definitely going to check that out.

As far as RB goes, what's already been said is pretty correct. They've tried to let players export discs into other games over the years, but it's been a bit of a mess, and some of the processes just don't work anymore for licensing reasons. The song bundles on the music store will save you a dollar or two here and there, and that's basically the only way I'm aware of to get deals on songs, unfortunately.

So is there any confirmation that this process still works today? Getting conflicting answers on this very topic suggesting that it doesnt work anymore or never worked very well to begin with.

Rockband 3 still works for sure, older Rock Bands don't sadly because they aren't for sale anymore and or/the licenses expired. They put out DLC songs from the older ones once in awhile though.

@ravelle: ok thanks for the info and one last tag for you: does it have to be a brand new version of rock band 3 or can I pick up a used copy for cheap?

I am not 100 percent sure but I believe a used copy should work, the main thing is that your PSN account needs to see you own the game, I booted it up and made a character in RB3 which gives you a trophy, sync that and the export option should be in RB4 in about half an hour or so. Rock band 3 goes quite cheap nowadays though.

Licences kinda suck, I would gladly pay for all the rock band tracks as packs if that was available

Can confirm. We also got a very good deal on a Rock Band bundle for PS4, but were a bit disappointed at the song selections available. After doing some research we decided to grab a used copy of RB3. Popped the disc into the PS3, created a character, sang a few songs using the USB mic from the bundle and got a couple of trophies. After confirming the trophies had synced to PSN we started up Rock Band 4 again and were very pleased to see that the option to export tracks from RB3 was now available. The export option cost $14.99 and was totally worth it to get all those great tracks!