Recently, an article in Billboard caused a bit of a stir among music gaming fans. It was mentioned that MTV is planning on expanding the Rock Band music library to an incredible 5,000 songs in 2009. Harmonix, however, today reached out to GameDaily BIZ to clarify this information.

As it turns out, Billboard had been referring to an interview Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos gave to Ars Technica in which he commented that the Rock Band catalog could expand from 500 to 5,000 "in the coming years." This interview took place at CES in January, so it's highly doubtful that MTV and Harmonix are going to be able to hit the 5,000 mark before 2009 comes to a close.

Rigopulos did note that Rock Band will be "less constrained from a genre standpoint, and I think you will see us starting to branch out into... whether it's country or R&B and jazz or funk, or things of that sort." He continued, "With the critical mass of the 'rock' core covered, of course we'll keep expanding it, but the critical mass is covered, so now we can start to branch off in ways that haven't made sense in the past but will make sense moving forward."