When music videos first became popular, the audience experience was shifted from aural to visual. Now, music-based video games provide an interactive dimension to audience enjoyment, and it has caught on like wildfire, with games like Guitar Hero and MTV Rock Band quickly becoming a staple for every household with a teenager (or gamers of any age, really). It’s a partnership made in heaven between the game and music industries.
Guitar Hero, Record Sales and Critics
The premise of interactive music games is simple – players have extension controllers such as dance mats, guitars or drum sets, and they play along to tracks in time to score points. SingStar and Lips are the karaoke equivalent, where players sing into a microphone.
Artistes and record companies are paid in licensing fees when their music is first used in video games, but the revenue stream really starts pouring in with extra downloads from customers. Gamers have access to online libraries from which they can purchase additional songs to use in the game, and amazingly, it has reaped a reported average of 200-300% increase in real-world record sales.
Evidently, the benefits of collaborating with video game developers are plenty – rock band Aerosmith is a perfect testament to that. In 2008, when they worked with Activision on Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, the results have been staggering. Within the first week of release, 550,000 copies had been snapped up by gamers, and the total sales for the game are more than 10 times the amount of the band’s 2004 album Honkin’ on Bobo.
More bands are already jumping on the Guitar Hero bandwagon, including Guns n’ Roses, Van Halen and Metallica. However, despite the obvious financial profits, these games have also been criticised by artistes like Jack White of The White Stripes and Prince, who dismiss them as a poor substitute of actually learning how to play musical instruments.
Piracy and Losses Suffered
Although not everybody can agree on the benefits of interactive music games, it is undeniable that they are helping revive an industry being drowned by illegal downloads. A 2007 report by the Institute for Policy innovation estimated that music piracy had set the US economy back by 19 billion dollars that year; and the figure would probably rise with the development of increasingly sophisticated software.
No matter how hard the music industry authorities try to clamp down on peer-to-peer networking sites, they will remain as much a threat as a many-headed Hydra. A&M Records won their lawsuit against Napster in 2000, citing copyright infringement; but there remain many avenues where consumers can download songs without paying a cent. Conversely, Napster has been revived, but uses a pay service as it is now impossible for them to get away with providing free downloads after all the negative publicity.
This is where interactive music downloads come into play – they are harder to pirate, because they are downloaded straight onto game consoles, and cannot be burned onto CDs or uploaded onto MP3 players. This is a significant advantage over traditional music downloads from iTunes; or even legitimate CDs which, despite having anti-piracy measures put in place, can still be ripped onto the computer.
Evolution of Music
So even though interactive music games cannot please all critics, its popularity among gamers will probably guarantee increased music sales for many years to come – until someone designs a way to pirate these songs too. But as the music industry is constantly evolving, so will its security measures – so audiences can keep rocking out till the next challenge reveals itself.
Partial source:
“Video (Games) Saved the Radio Star”by Shane Conroy, Voyeur March 2009
 |
