Welcome to the Rock Band DLC Statosphere! The only stop you need to know about for the juiciest statistics on how well your favorite Rock Band downloadable songs are doing. Compare and discuss over at the Rock Band Forums (or wherever). NO MORE PIE CHARTS!!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cherry Bombs have called a "cease fire" this week. While the PAX Pack numbers are not terribly impressive "Skullcrusher Mountain" edges out B.Y.O.B. and Toxicity for the #1 spot on the week. In other news: Promised Land finally reaches 100,000.. Yeah, remember that song? What took so friggin' long? IT'S FREE. Yes, the PS3 stats are broke still.. Broken web leaderboards=no PS3 stats.

Now to talk just a bit about why this may well be the very last update of the Statosphere. With Rock Band 2 right around the corner it's unknown how the leaderboards will behave. Will there be separate leaderboards for both games? Will they be combined? Basically if they do anything but behave as they currently do it changes this site entirely. It's pretty doubtful they will behave the same way, but you never know. Assuming there is change the best case scenario the stats would lose some accuracy, just how much is unknown but my bet is it will be too much. We'll just have to wait and see how this turns out.

Assuming this is the last update, it's been a great run. Nearly half a year without a miss! When starting this site it was never my intention to update on a weekly basis. It's been a lot of fun though despite keeping me busier than a one legged man in an asskicking contest from time to time. Many thanks are due to code guru Casto21 who made the weekly update schedule a hell of a lot easier on me. Casto is the man.

To everyone who has visited Statosphere, posted in the Statosphere threads on the Rock Band forums, or used the stats in some semi-constructive/unique ways over the months: Thanks for all your support, comments (good OR bad), emails, and naked pictures (good only)! It all helped in giving what really is just a giant, glorified, list of numbers a lot of character and made my work in building this site and, more importantly, keeping it updated all the more worthwhile.

So thank YOU! (yes you!)

There, there. Don't get too teared up. Statosphere 2: Revenge of the Cherry Bombs will always be a possibility depending on how the leaderboards turn out. In the meantime I'll be enjoying Rock Band 2 inbetween work and play. Maybe we'll meet one day, I do love a good band quickplay. Just look for the guy who wont quit picking Cherry Bomb.

We have a highly trained team of monkeys which were purchased off of eBay in 1999 during a Y2K scare. It's only after 2 years of rigorous training high in the mountains of Tibet that they learned to look at the the guitar leaderboards from the Xbox 360 version of the game. Diligently they look for the poor sap who recorded the worst score ever made on any given song. Then they proceed to cackle and write down the rank, it's kind of amusing.

Those answers get complicated. They are accurate, but only to a degree. There are a few problems: A) The leaderboards only go to 100,000 (not even highly trained monkeys can track beyond that) B) Some users might not even play guitar at all, or perhaps do not play the songs in a mode where the score will be uploaded to the leaderboards (such as being offline). This is meant to be a baseline and can be used to judge relative popularity since any condition set for one song can generally be applied to every other song as well. Since these numbers can only tell half the story, think of it sort of like a poll.. These are NOT actual sales figures, though one could construct a solid argument that they can be made in to estimates since everything should be relative. You can assume any given song has sold at least the amount presented. Does that mean "Cherry Bomb" sold 50k on the Xbox 360? Doubtful, right? If you really want to know what the 100% official amount sold is.. Well, you'll have to phone one in to Harmonix/EA/MTV for that.

These stats are only as good as the time you take to analyze them. In the end, it's best to simply use your better judgement.

The Cherry Bomb status is reserved for songs that perform remarkably poorly in comparison to other songs in the game. When this site started the song "Cherry Bomb" was clearly the worst in terms of performance, being a release day song yet also having the lowest lifetime total. It was given a special status as somewhat of a joke. Shortly thereafter 2 more songs joined the list that would apparently be on track to perform nearly as poorly (if not more poorly) than Cherry Bomb, those songs being The Mother Hips songs. They were given the status as well, and now it is here to stay.

Don't read too far into the status. It's not a commentary on the quality of the music, pushing my own musical opinions on to this site would be extraordinarily stupid. If you love a song that has the Cherry Bomb status then you should realize that when a song performs poorly in Rock Band that is likely that the song is selling phenomenally well in the game compared to elsewhere (itunes, etc). Maybe being a Cherry Bomb is not so bad!