Bottom Of The Barrel

Is Guitar Hero the new iTunes?

In it's first week on the shelves, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith sold over 500,000 copies and at 50 bucks a pop that's a $25 million dollar week for Activision/RedOctane [which I'm sure the Aerosmith boys will see a nice chunk of]. This is quite a change for Aerosmith, given there last album, Honkin' on Bobo, has sold a mere 590k copies since 2004. Ok it's not quite fair to compare one of the hottest gaming platforms on earth and a game that contains an artists greatest hits vs a band's 14th album which contained 11 blues covers and 1 original track however it does ask the question, is GH a new music distribution platform?

Back on April 11th, Motley Crue released their recent Saints of Los Angeles single as downloadable content on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Store. In the first few weeks of it's release, the Rock Band version outsold iTunes and Amazon downloadable versions five to one. The news prompted Allen Kovac, of Motley Crue's management company, to comment to Rolling Stone: "Pretty soon, this is going to be the way you sell music."

If the guys at Guitar Hero and Rock Band can find the way to export the music from the console to your iPod, they could become the next big music portal [and help save the record industry from itself].

Labels: Music, Technology

posted by TheWino @ 10:15 AM