Photo: Jimmy PrescottDavid Edery, the worldwide games portfolio manager for Xbox Live Arcade, a research affiliate of the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies Program, and author of the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, blogged here last week about video games. This is his second of two guest posts on the subject. Here’s an earlier relevant discussion about the music industry.
Can Guitar Hero Help Save the Music Industry?
By David Edery
A Guest Post
One of the most interesting developments in the video-game industry is the way that games are being used to jazz up — if not completely re-invent — other, more mature industries. There are several good examples of this phenomenon: the stuffed toy industry and the fitness industry, for example, but my focus for this guest post is the music industry.
While many people are familiar with now-ubiquitous games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, few realize how dramatically these games have affected music consumption in the U.S.
Both Rock Band and Guitar Hero are extremely successful franchises that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for their respective publishers. Players use controllers that resemble musical instruments (a guitar, a drum set, or a microphone) to “play” their favorite songs, which come bundled with the games or can be downloaded separately at extra cost. Think of it as the next generation of karaoke.
When Guitar Hero was first created by Harmonix (which is also the creator of Rock Band, not coincidentally), the music industry cared little for video games. How things have changed! The president of Universal Music Group claims that songs included in Guitar Hero will sell two to three times better.
Weezer’s “My Name is Jonas,” a song originally released in 1994, saw a tenfold increase in sales when included in Guitar Hero 3. More interestingly, a special version of Guitar Hero focused entirely on Aerosmith’s music resulted in more revenue for the band than any individual Aerosmith album.
I contacted MTV Networks and they were kind enough to share several interesting statistics. For example, Motley Crüe’s single “Saints of Los Angeles” premiered in the Rock Band Music Store day and date with its single release, and it sold more than five times as many units there as it did on iTunes in its first week.
Back in July, twelve of the The Who’s greatest hits were released for Rock Band, and in two weeks, fans purchased over 715,000 tracks. During the same two-week period, all twelve tracks experienced a 159 percent increase in SoundScan sales. (SoundScan measures physical CD sales, as well as digital music sales.)
And in August, Buckcherry’s new single “Rescue Me” was made available in Rock Band prior to the group’s new album release. The success of the download is credited with helping the new album Black Butterfly to debut at number eight on the Billboard Top 200.
No band, no matter how famous, has failed to take notice of this phenomenon. MTVN and the Beatles recently announced the development of an entirely new music game based solely on the Beatles’ music to be released during the 2009 holiday season. We can definitely expect more announcements of this sort in the years to come.
This is not simply a localized phenomenon. Businesses of all kinds are finding ways to use games and the principles they teach us to juice sales and re-invent moribund markets. And while not everything can be turned into a game, a great many things can be. After all, who ever really imagined that a game in which you solve math problems would become one of the great commercial success stories of the modern game industry?
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I am interested in what this phenomenon will mean for the many new musicians who will are being initially introduced to music through these games. It is only a matter of time for real guitar tutorials to fully adopt this mode of instruction (if they haven’t already in one form or another). What will the supply and demand of new bands look like in the future if teens with expert drum technique are a dime-a-dozen?
I read an interview with Slash, the guitarist on the cover of the first Guitar Hero. He said a kid recently came up to him because he recognized him from Guitar Hero. After talking for a few minutes the kid asked, “so do you play real guitar too?”
Last year I noticed that Guitar Hero (and Rock Band for that matter) had broken grounds where video games had never been.
I was in the waiting area for my daughters gymnastics and I overheard a couple of mom’s talking about…Guitar Hero. I thought to myself that this was probably the first time that chitter chatter at gymnastics pickup had been about a video game.
I work in the Financial Industry in a very conservative organization in the midwest. During their annual giving campaign last year, they had a daily Guitar Hero contest. They had it up on big screen projector’s. My guess again, is that this was the first time a video game had been used like this in this > 150 year old company.
My youngest son (6) got an iTunes giftcard for his birthday. What albulm did he buy? Metallica’s Master of Puppets.
My oldest son (9) would ask before every football practice and game if I would put on Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills.
Influences of Guitar Hero.
I couldn’t be happier that my kids are listening to The Who, Guns ‘N Roses, Aerosmith, Foo Fighters, etc. instead of the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montanna or whatever flavor of the Backstreet Boys type band of the 1/2 decade is.
Seems sad that for the cost of the console and fake drums, guitar and mike kids could own their own real instruments to noodle about with and make real music instead.
Why is it sad, #12, that someone would prefer to spend their money as they want, instead of how you would want? Does it also make you sad to think that there are people who dress, eat, or speak differently than you do?
I sing in two acapella choirs and find it much more satisfying that pretending I’m a fake rock star. The music is much more challenging and it is in tune. Too many kids are growing up thinking that jumping around while choking a microphone is all there is to music and will be unprepared for real singing, and more important listening, later in life (if they aren’t deaf from the volume turned up too loud),
I met some of the people working at Harmonix a couple weeks back and learned that not only has this been a huge boon for record companies, but that when negotiating for the rights on a particularly well known song/band, that the company will often try to push lesser known, independent bands into being included as a condition for licensing the requested song.
Why game developers haven’t wised up and realised why they should even have to pay to give these companies free publicity and marketting is anyone’s guess. With any luck this will help serve as another nail in the coffin for the RIAA’s ridiculous crusade in the name of intellectual property.
Hyperbolae, the sentiment is absurd..
Suggesting that a game that includes what maybe 100 ‘rock’ songs (mostly old 70s/80s rock) can save an industry in the business of releasing 100,000+ NEW songs in a variety of genres that do not generally conform to the ‘rock band’ format is absurd.
its like a band-aid on a knifewound. Rockband may boost the sales of aged rockers back catalogues but will have no impact on the sales of most conteporary artists… when was the last time you even heard a guitar solo in a top 10 hit ?