Music games like the Rock Band series were a bright light that burned out too quickly. The whole genre went through an epic boom and bust all in less than a decade and has almost totally vanished. I'm not sure how I stumbled on this, but there was some wiki where people had collaborated on a potential Rock Band 5 setlist, even though Harmonix has said they have no plans for a new game in the series.
Still, all it took was that one pleasant discovery and I was back on my bullshit. I'm not sure why coming up with hypothetical soundtracks for these games has always been so satisfying, but it is. Even though the series had something like 3,000 available songs in the end, there is still so much great music that never made it to the plastic instruments. Here is a list of 84 songs, which was the number of tracks in both Rock Band 2 and 3 and divides very nicely into the seven difficulty groups. It's funny how people always try and have a variety of different genres when they do this but you can always inevitably tell what they really like. This one probably has more metal than would ever make it into one of the games (gotta have room for lightweight hipster songs, after all) and it was definitely done by a singer.
One last note: I avoided bands that were vocal about never wanting to be in any of these games, i.e. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and a few others. It's more interesting that way, anyhow. Enjoy these images that I mocked up using a spiffy little program that lets you generate your own difficulty rankings that look like they came right out of the game! The only drawback was you can only use the genres that Harmonix used, so the two Eurobeat songs had to be classified as "Pop/Dance/Electronic." They should have added some Eurobeat while they had the chance.
Ter 0 - Warmup
Tier 1 - Apprentice
Tier 2 - Solid
Tier 3 - Moderate
Tier 4 - Challenging
Tier 5 - Nightmare
Tier 6 - Impossible
And one special hidden bonus track!
