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Gamers: Perfect Market for Music

Rock Band creators MTV and Harmonix are showing big music one way to save its tanking business model: sell songs to gamers. Indeed, you might not be able to get Gen Y to pay a buck for songs download on the Internet, but you could easily get Rock Band and Guitar Hero fans to pay twice the price for the privilege of adding new songs to their virtual set list.

A recent update to Rock Band has effectively turned the game into an online music store, as gamers can now buy and instantly play new songs, released weekly, directly from the game for $1 to $2. Like iTunes, users have the option of previewing each song before they buy. They can browse by song artist, song title and eventually, by album. Songs appear alongside album art and include information about how difficult they are to play on each of the game's four instruments (guitar, bass, drums, vocals).

Selling songs via one or two popular video games may not sound like much--especially when you consider how painfully and rapidly CD sales are falling--but Guitar Hero is a billion dollar-and-growing franchise, and Rock Band is headed in that direction, too. The latter has already sold 6 million songs through Xbox Live, and with the new store, those numbers will only get bigger. Meanwhile, SoundScan evidence shows that Rock Band sales drive digital sales, and visa-versa. Imagine getting people to pay twice for downloading the songs they love? Suddenly, the music industry is starting to look like a brave new world.

Read the whole story at Ars Technica »

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