The official Rock Band facebook page has revealed that it has pulled a few Metallica songs from the Rock Band store.
More songs will be yanked from the store in the future, but right now Metallica has been affected. The Metallica Pack 01 that includes the tracks “Ride The Lightning”, “And Justice For All”, and “Blackened” are now gone and will also “be pulled from 1st party marketplaces in the immediate future“.
Here’s the reason for songs getting axed from the Rock Band store:
“When licensing songs for release for any platform, including DLC, agreements include term limits on how long the content may be sold on a given platform. This isn’t specific to Rock Band – it’s something that exists in pretty much all licensing agreements. Now, over five years since the release of the first batch of Rock Band DLC, we’re reaching the end of some of the earliest licenses we secured.”
The Metallica songs had been available to download since November 20th, 2007. It’s been well over five years now so the license for the song use has been expired. You can be sure that more songs will be axed for the weeks to come.
If you have already purchased/downloaded the songs, you will not be affected by this. Even if you need to re-download the songs for any reason, you should be able to do so as long as it’s already been purchased on your account.
