Motley Crue also debuts new single in game
>from Xbox360fanboy.com
First Def Leppard – now Motley Crue are doing it; their new debut single “Saints of Los Angeles” will first be released at a game (the game of which we WILL not mention the title).
Def Leppard was choosing for worldwide introduction; not Motley Crue…… hahahaha
But what is this with the “old Rockers” – they are the ones who lost a lot of money out of MP3’s = and the first ones to embrace “the new money making machine”…???
Smart – although I would have guessed that Metallica would have been the first (as they are probably the most cheap ass rockers out there….. = remember the fight of Ulrich with Napster…??).
Metallica and Lars Ulrich are dinosaurs, clinging to an outdated business model. I don’t think this will be “the new money making machine” the music industry is waiting for. Only a relative small number of artists will be able to generate money this way. The reality is that music in general doesn’t have the same ‘value’ as it had in the past, not only in an artistic sense but as an economic product as well.
Metallica (with) Ulrich are nicely doing business on the Rockband and GuiterHero machine. So – they did discover “the new model”.
With Rockband and GuitarHero the music has become valuable again. That is also why MTV is such a big shareholder in the Rockband merchandise.
And I am really surprised that the old dinosaurs of Motley Crue and Def Leppard are the first one to introduce their new songs….. But okay – Metallica doesn’t have new songs…. last one was in 19one-one?
Nah, games like this don’t make music much more valuable again. They only target a relatively small part of the music market (people who are interested in a combination of music and gameplay, most people are probably interested in one of those at the time, not both). Besides that, this form of releasing music can only be profitable for a small percentage of artists. While the cost of producing music has gone down over the years due to improved technology, producing games is getting more and more expensive (see for an example here: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/crossplatform.ars/2). In other words, producing an album is much cheaper today than say 10 or 15 years ago, but game development costs are exponentially increasing. So, only a very small percentage of artists are worth the risk to use them in a game.
I do think that music (either Rockband/Guitar Hero or Need for Speeds etc…..)gets a much bigger turnover than before; in Januari MTV told us that they sold 2.5 million songs…. Remember; this is only ONE game….
Some bands sell more of their cd’s because of their tune in Need for Speed….. But – same with commercials – like in Need for Speed; an artist gets paid one solid price (so – not per copy sold). So I do think the gaming industry gives a (for some BIG) boost in the sales.
I do think that Dragonforce is really happy with their appearence on the GuitarHero with “Through the fire and flames”…
Yes, it can give a boost in sales, but I don’t think the game industry will “save” the music industry. If the number of songs/artists grows for these games, it can be part of a strategy to make money. The money then comes from multiple sources, gigs, mercandise and gaming. We’ll see…
The number of 2.5 million songs is off course small compared with the total music market. iTunes alone sold more than 4 *billion* songs so far. There is probably room for a bigger market share for music released by the gaming industry, but I don’t think it will be a substantial share that really counts.
[...] remember a discussion on my weblog about the function/extra value of games to the music business… = well…. I stick to my [...]