Rock Band 2 Charges for RB1 Song Imports

Owners of the Xbox 360 edition of Rock Band 2 will have to pay a small fee in order to import "most" of songs from the original, developer Harmonix has disclosed.

That fee will be no greater than $5, studio representative John Drake assured MTV.

Drake explained that the fee stems from licensing costs. The developer previously told Shacknews that similar licensing issues were the reason that it had yet to specify which songs from the first Rock Band disc will be playable in the sequel.

The fee does not apply to all of the downloadable Rock Band tracks that have arrived across the last year, which will be playable in Rock Band 2 at no extra cost.

Along with the fee, the import functionality requires players to have the original Rock Band disc, as those songs will be installed on the hard drive. After that initial installation, the Rock Band 1 disc is not needed to play the tracks in Rock Band 2.

Rock Band 2 hits the Xbox 360 on September 14 with 84 on-disc tracks. Harmonix has yet to detail the import process for the PlayStation 3 version of the multi-instrument music game, which arrives in October, but it is assumed the process will be similar.

Though the Wii edition of Rock Band 2, also due in October, is said to support downloadable content, it is not yet known if that version will support song imports from the original Rock Band, especially as the Wii only has 512MB of internal storage space.

However, the PlayStation 2 release will not support song importing, at least in the same form, as only the first few models of the system allowed hard drives to be connected.