"Rock Band," "Guitar Hero" drive digital song sales
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DENVER (Billboard) - In the two months since MTV Networks  and Harmonix released the music-based videogame "Rock Band,"  players have purchased and downloaded more than 2.5 million  additional songs made available after the game's initial  distribution.
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Album sales have continued their downward slide this year, but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50 percent over this time last year.
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Activision Inc is set to launch  "Guitar Hero 3" amid expectations that the latest installment  of its music-themed franchise will be a platinum hit for the  second-biggest U.S. video game publisher.
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Having a No. 1 album just isnât what it used to be. This week Alicia Keys is back atop the Billboard chart with âAs I Amâ (J), but the 61,000 copies it has sold is barely above the historic low for a No. 1 album, Nielsen SoundScan reported. The âJunoâ soundtrack, on Rhino, fell to No. 2, with 55,000 sold. New releases dot the chart this week. The Mars Volta, which revels in head-spinningly complex progressive rock, opened in the third spot with 54,000 sales of âFrances the Muteâ (Universal); the Welsh heavy metal band Bullet for My Valentine reached fourth place with âScream Aim Fireâ (Jive), selling 53,000; and the â2008 Grammy Nomineesâ compilation (Hip-O/Universal) moved 50,000, opening at No. 5. The remix album âHannah Montana 2: Non-Stop Dance Partyâ (Disney) bowed at No. 7, and Vampire Weekend, the acclaimed New York indie band, reached No. 17 with its self-titled debut on the XL label.
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THE REGION Viacom Inc.'s MTV unit agreed to buy Harmonix Music Systems Inc., the developer of video games such as Guitar Hero, for $175 million to expand its interactive and digital businesses. MTV, based in New York, and Harmonix, of Cambridge, will develop products for the cable television network's online and mobile businesses, spokeswoman Marnie Black said in an interview. ...
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In a year where Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store became the third-largest music retailer in the U.S., conventional album sales continued a downward trend, while the sale of digital tracks surged by 45 percent.
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Harmonix's new game, the aptly named Rock Band, will be released for Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 by year's end. The company had a surprise success with its previous franchise, Guitar Hero, but Rock Band -- along with its four peripherals -- will retail for $200, four times as much as a typical game.
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The U.S. music industry is becoming  more open-minded about working with online music stores from  the tiniest start-up to Amazon.com , hoping to boost  digital music sales and erode the dominance of Apple Inc's   iTunes.
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Tycho:  The aggregate price for all Rock Band peripherals was originally three hundred dollars, going by the vague entries in the Gamespot database, but those strange figures are really the chicken entrails of the gaming industry - its powers of prophecy are somewhat in question.
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Music sales last year are expected to be down by 10% despite the growing popularity of the digital music market.
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Activision Inc. said  on Thursday it had sold more than 300,000 downloadable song  packs for its hit &quot;Guitar Hero II&quot; music game, giving it  confidence it will not have to lower prices despite outrage at  the cost among some game fans.
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MTV says that players of its Rock Band have downloaded more than 2.5 million songs since the game went on sale.
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Sales of portable MP3 digital-audio players are booming and are set to generate US&#36;58 billion in revenue worldwide by 2008, according to a new study from research firm IDC.
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U.S. album sales were down 4.2 percent in the first half of the year, but sales of music downloaded online soared 77 percent, according to industry figures.
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NEW YORK (Billboard) - The music industry continues to build bridges between the digital and physical world.
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$160m cash purchase to propel digital music market entry
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At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, it&#39;s clear that consumers are making choices that are driving industry changes, and nowhere is that more evident than in the digital music business.Music industry and technology executives convened for the Billboard Digital Music Live conference Wednesday to talk about what those in the business need to do to meet the needs of music fans who appear to be running the show.&quot;2008 has to be the year we get real or the business as we know it goes away,&quot; said Fred Goldring, an entertainment attorney with Goldring Hertz &amp; Lichtenstein. He said that consumers will access music regardless of whether artists, labels, publishers, and digital music distributors approve of the means or receive money from the exchange.Since Napster turned the music industry on its ear in 2000, the digital-music business has been rocked by dissent among artists, labels, publishers, and the breed of technology companies distributing and selling music online that emerged in Napster&#39;s wake. All of these parties want to derive revenue from their contribution to the business, but have been arguing for years about how everyone should get paid.As this drama unfolds behind the scenes, consumers continue to find ways to bypass DRM and emerging revenue models to download and share music, making it not just impossible for the music industry to make money from traditional means, but also difficult to make money at all. In the meantime, artists have embarked on their own revolution, using social-networking sites and other online means to get their music directly in the hands of fans and finding other ways to derive revenue from their work.An example of the latter is the controversial and much-publicized move by U.K. rock band Radiohead to sell its new album &quot;In Rainbows&quot; direct to consumers without going through its record label or Apple&#39;s iTunes Store. The album first went on sale in October on Radiohead&#39;s Web site, allowing users to choose their price for the record; a few weeks ago, Radiohead released the record to iTunes and other retail channels.Scenarios like this will continue to happen, both among major-label artists and independent or unsigned artists. Whether they work is not the point; it&#39;s what the industry will do to work within these models and support them rather than continue to resist that will decide how the industry will fare in the future, said Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group. Nettwerk is a Canadian privately owned record label and artist management company.&quot;The corporate side of it has to shift,&quot; he said. &quot;The corporate people have not allowed us to do what we know we have to do. This is about the consumer, about monetizing their behavior and giving them choice. For all of the people that believe in controlling the&#160;[intellectual property]&#160;and how [the music] gets to consumers, the game is over. It was over seven or eight years ago, and soon your business will be over.&quot;Goldring suggested the industry focus on business models built solely around the networks that allow users to download music and find ways for everyone involved to make money that way.&quot;We have to stop trying to keep our old business alive&#160;... and figure out how to monetize the pipes [music files] are going through,&quot; he said.Barney Wragg, head of digital, EMI Music Group, said that in a perfect world, scenarios like the ones McBride and Goldring propose would exist. However, the needs of different artists vary, and there are still concerns about the integrity of their work and how they will be compensated for it as new business models emerge.&quot;I have artists that don&#39;t want to be involved in certain business models,&quot; he said. &quot;I have to balance those conflicts. ... There are a whole bunch of artists who are worried about how they&#39;re going to get paid, and what this is going to do about their representation or their art.&quot;Allowing their music to be distributed through ad-supported online music services is a particularly hard sell for artists who worry that having their work be associated with advertising &quot;devalues&quot; it, Wragg added.Subscription-based models such as Rhapsody that don&#39;t give users ownership of their music have struggled to take off. Wragg compared music fans&#39; view of subscription models to the early days of e-mail, when people wanted files to be stored locally and were adverse to the concept of e-mail existing only on a remote server.That concept changed over time, as will the perception of subscriptions if they are marketed to consumers in the right way, he said.Another factor that should boost the popularity of subscriptions in the future is the increased spending of younger fans who are naturally more comfortable with the idea of not owning their music, said Matthew DeFilippis, vice president of new media and technology for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a membership organization representing the rights of artists.&quot;Ownership is a generational thing,&quot; he said. &quot;Even though kids today are buying from iTunes, I don&#39;t think they care about owning a thing. As they become the new generation of homeowners and bill payers, [music subscription] will be moving toward a cable [TV] model.&quot;