Baka's Site

The MTV2 Pack

March 26, 2026

A picture of the MTV2 Pack

Trying something different with this one, not gonna be an editorial talking about me specifically or something I did, but something just generally interesting I feel like talking about (which is what most of these editorials should've been anyways, but eh). As some of you know, Rock Band (as in, the games) have been the main thing I've been into for the past few years, and I've found some interesting stuff as a result of being super into these games. When I looked through the list of delisted songs, of course most of these were artists I didn't recognize/know (at the time anyways, I really got into some artists like Locksley later on), but one pack that was delisted always stuck out to me, the MTV2 Pack, I was always like "why is it called that and why did the songs get pulled?"

Of course since I play on RPCS3 and have a modded version of RB3 it took basically no effort to find and download the pack onto the game, and the specific songs in the pack were:

So then my thought process was "oh, these are obscure artists, they probably didn't allow them to relicense the songs", but that didn't answer why the pack was called the MTV2 Pack, my guess was just that they had been on rotation on MTV2 at the time, so I did some research and it turns out the answer is actually pretty interesting.

Around 2005, MTV2 started a competition known as The Dew Circuit Breakout (bc it was sponsored by Mountain Dew), as a way to get more unknown/up and coming bands to get their name and exposure out, but it's the 2007 version that's the most interesting here, as they had a website where you could vote on who you wanted to win, and the winners would end up getting promoted on MTV/MTV2 by having their songs on rotation and getting featured in other music-related blocks they had, and lo and behold, the top 3 contestants were The Myriad (who won the whole thing), The Material, and Them Terribles, with one of the prizes for winning being their songs getting put in Rock Band, with the pack releasing in early 2008. And I guess the promotion worked on me, considering I'd never heard of these three but I love all three of these songs, even put them on my spotify playlist. I ESPECIALLY love A Clean Shot, I put both the song and the music video for it on my PSP, it's the only song from the pack you can still buy separately as DLC, though that could change with the DLC for the games slowly being delisted. If I'm right, the pack was one of the first to be delisted too, shortly after the Metallica pack in 2013.

As for why the bands had their songs put in Rock Band, it's because Harmonix at the time was owned by MTV Games, so it was a sort of cross promotion thing, it's why there are also songs by Spongebob Squarepants and South Park (well, Eric Cartman but close enough) in the store as DLC, since they're Viacom properties.

So what happened to the bands afterwards? Well starting with The Material, they're still around, in 2011 they put another one of their songs on the Rock Band Network (Stay Here Forever), and they put out an EP in 2018. Their Twitter had them post tour dates for shows as recently as last year, so I assume they're still touring and playing live. The Myriad kept playing but unfortunately their drummer died in 2010 from cancer, leading to the band going on hiatus for over a decade, but they started putting out new music in 2023 and have seemingly reformed, having released some new singles last year, hell just last month they released an EP that featured covers of 5 Radiohead songs, so they're still active as I type this. As for Them Terribles, they released their album in 2007, and then... nothing for like a decade, but they returned in 2017 with a single and then released another single (well, it has 3 songs but it's a single) in 2018, but it's been nothing since then, they don't even have proper social media iirc, and their site has been dead since 2010/2011 (although going on the Wayback Machine, it just redirected to their MySpace so it wasn't really a website), so I don't know what they're up to.

Again, different editorial than I normally do but I'll do more of these in the future, just ones where I can go in-depth on stuff I like or think is interesting.