(This was supposed to go out yesterday, but pksage has been swamped with stuff for our final release. Thanks for your patience!)
When you run a database, any kind of database, you are inevitably drawn to the siren song of statistics. We’ve got two and a half years of customs just begging to be analyzed! Isn’t that exciting??? No? Just us? Too bad! You get to sit through this post anyway.
All stats exclude 2x bass pedal versions, rhythm versions, and the GHtoRB3 back catalog unless otherwise specified.

• Dates
  • C3’s first release (The Rapture) was on April 9, 2013, and our last release is tomorrow, October 2, 2015.
  • That’s over 129 weeks, or 2 years, 5 months, and 23 days.
  • If we were Harmonix, and The Rapture was the release of RB1, it would be May 11, 2010, and we’d be releasing Judas Priest’s British Steel live album.
• Songs & Releases
  • C3 released custom Rock Band songs during every one of those 129 weeks, with no exceptions.
  • We released 1321 original songs in total; 1501 unique songs with the GHtoRB3 back catalog, and 1683 song packages including 2x bass and rhythm versions.
    • For an unfair comparison (since we don’t have to worry about trivial things like first-party certification), Harmonix had released 977 DLC songs by their 129th week.
  • We had 132 release dates over those weeks, averaging 10.06 unique songs per week.
  • Our biggest week was Genesis Chronicles (80 songs) on November 14, 2014, and our smallest week was Tears for Fears C01 (3 songs) on April 17, 2015.
  • The artists with the most C3 customs are, in order:
    1. Genesis (77 songs)
    2. Queensrÿche (51 songs)
    3. Dream Theater (33 songs)
    4. Rush (31 songs)
    5. Guns N’ Roses (17 songs)
  • The (admittedly user-defined and kind of shaky) genres with the most C3 customs are, in order:
    1. Rock (268 songs)
    2. Metal (224 songs)
    3. Pop-Rock (158 songs)
    4. Alternative (148 songs)
    5. Prog (138 songs)
  • Each decade of rock music had this many C3 releases:
    • 1950s (5 songs)
    • 1960s (83 songs)
    • 1970s (170 songs)
    • 1980s (294 songs)
    • 1990s (306 songs)
    • 2000s (271 songs)
    • 2010s (189 songs)
  • Multitrack audio stems were included for 291 songs, and partial stems were included in a further 58 songs. (All of GHtoRB3’s back catalog had multitracks, pushing us to 476 songs with full stems.)
  • Almost every release in our DB (including GHtoRB3), with single-digit exceptions for each platform, have been converted to Wii, PS3, and Phase Shift formats. This is entirely thanks to the hard work of StackOverflow0x, TDCMark, bluzer, and AkiraNomuraBCN, often with tools designed by TrojanNemo.
• Downloads
  • C3 has served over 2 million custom song downloads from over 60,000 unique IPs.
  • The most-downloaded C3 releases, in order:
    1. Guns N’ Roses – “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (farottone)
    2. Britney Spears – “Toxic” (Nyxyxylyth)
    3. Guns N’ Roses – “Paradise City” (farottone)
    4. ABBA – “Mamma Mia” (drummerockband)
    5. Guns N’ Roses – “November Rain” (farottone)
    6. Led Zeppelin – “Kashmir” (farottone)
    7. Led Zeppelin – “Immigrant Song” (farottone)
    8. Michael Jackson – “Thriller” (farottone and RUSHEE)
    9. Led Zeppelin – “Black Dog” (farottone)
    10. Pink Floyd – “Time” (Nyxyxylyth)
  • Of C3 authors who released 10 or more songs, these authors had the highest average downloads, in order:
    1. RyanHYK
    2. drummerockband
    3. farottone
    4. BearzUnlimited
    5. Lowlander
  • We had to specify “10 or more songs”, because otherwise Orange Harrison destroys everyone with The Beatles.
• Pro Mode
  • C3 releases included:
    • 1040 songs with harmony vocals (1188 with GHtoRB3)
    • 162 songs with “(2x Bass Pedal)” Drums charts
    • 859 songs with Pro Keys (919 with GHtoRB3)
    • 89 songs with Pro Guitar or Pro Bass (93 with GHtoRB3)
  • A large number of our Pro G/B charts were authored by columbo777, who I have criminally under-credited since the beginning.
• Packs
  • We grouped our releases into 166 packs, with an average of 6.15 songs per pack.
  • Within those packs, we had 19 full albums, plus at least two packs that finished partial albums from Harmonix releases.
  • Exactly 300 songs were released as singles.
  • There were lots of “C02” packs, and a few “C03” packs, but only Guns N’ Roses and Queensrÿche made it to 4 packs. (All of Queensrÿche’s were full albums!)
• Authors
  • It’s hard to pin down exact author counts, but over 90 different people worked on official C3 releases.
  • The most prolific author is farottone, who personally authored or contributed to over 460 songs. This means farottone is at least partially responsible for 35% of all C3 songs.
  • After farottone is Nightmare Lyra, who authored or contributed to 130 songs. After the two of them, there’s a sharp drop before the rest of us mortal authors.
  • Excluding farottone, because he throws off all the numbers, each author contributed an average of ~16 songs.
  • Our author team is from all over the world — at least ten different countries are represented, including Italy, Norway, Canada, the US, and others.
• Blog
  • Since it launched with The Rapture, this blog has received over 925,000 page views. That’s an average of more than 7,000 views per week.
  • We’ve made 163 posts, most of which are release posts.
  • About 155 of those posts were made by me, pksage.
  • With a very few exceptions, every release post has had at least one preview video. These 170+ videos were made by Lowlander and TrojanNemo, and represent ridiculous amounts of time spent capturing all the footage and editing it together.
• Forums
  • The old forums had 4500 topics, 61,949 posts, and 2,072 members before they were migrated to the new platform.
  • Our most active poster is (unsurprisingly) farottone, who had 4,124 posts in the old forums.
• Time
  • Using rough estimates for how long it takes to author a song (~12 hours per song, give or take), C3 authors worked for over 600 days to create our catalog. That means if one person had sat down and authored our entire catalog without sleep, it would have taken almost 2 years. And again, that estimate is very conservative.
  • pksage spent maybe an hour and change preparing every weekly release, between writing the blog copy, populating the database with all of the metadata, copying out the songs to the blog, forum, and bug tracker, and doing other miscellaneous tasks. Counting weekly releases, web development, and other C3 management, pksage has spent over 200 hours doing administrative work for C3, which does not include authoring or playtesting.
  • Speaking of playtesting, we have no actual metrics on this, but we required most of our authors to put their songs through a “sanity check”/playtesting process before release. Almost all of our authors helped out with this process, and total playtesting time is easily in the hundreds of hours.
  • If you were to play all of our customs back-to-back with no time between songs, it would take you 4 days, 1 hour, 51 minutes, and 1 second. (If you add the GHtoRB3 back catalog, it would take 16 more hours.)
  • If you were really bored, and you played every chart for every song on every instrument, it would take you 81 days. I sure hope there’s not an achievement for that.
• Other Trivia
  • Ten songs from the C3 library had to be pulled because they were announced for RB4 or RB4 DLC.
  • Many of our songs were not given a maturity rating by their authors, but of the ones that were, a full 91 songs were rated Mature for explicit content.
  • The actual release process at 10 AM Eastern was almost all automated, but every week required at least one or two manual tasks right at 10. pksage has done 10 AM release stuff from highway rest stops, from friends’ apartments, as a passenger in a moving car, from two airports, while in a panic from his phone while walking his dog after forgetting about it, and in at least four different US states.
  • farottone and pksage are both married and somehow stayed that way throughout the 129 weeks of C3.

That was…educational! farottone and I might have one final blog post for you tonight, depending on how long our tasks for tomorrow’s release take. Either way, see you tomorrow for our sort-of-grand finale!