"Rock Band," "Guitar Hero" drive digital song sales
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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. Activision, meanwhile, said it has sold more than  5 million new songs via download for "Guitar Hero III: Legends  of Rock" since it began adding downloadable content in early  November.
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By one measure of its success,  chart-topping rock band The Darkness has sold enough song  downloads, T-shirts and thongs on its official Web site  http://www.TheDarknessRock.com to nearly finance the group's  next recording.
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The success of the video game Rock Band  is drumming up revenue for the music industry.\
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Sales of MP3 players are rocketing, fuelled by falling unit prices, integration of MP3 support into a wider range of devices and the creation of legal music download websites.
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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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Digital music sales have doubled in the last year, but overall music industry sales are falling.
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While sales of physical  albums plummeted during the first nine months of 2006, big  increases in the demand for digital tracks and albums have kept  the overall music business in line with last year's totals.
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Buying digital music can be confusing. On one hand, you have an alphabet soup of acronyms, all referring to varying formats. On the other hand, you have a slew of online retailers, each furiously competing for your hard-earned music dollar. And in the middle, you have an avalanche of players, each of which offer different features and work with different formats.
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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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Although the record companies raked in $2.9 billion in revenue from digital music sales in the past year -- up 40 percent -- the collapsing CD market is dragging them down.
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In 1996, the Internet was a curiosity for most, the record labels were swollen with cash from CD sales, and R.E.M.'s "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" could only add to that hoard. Critics and fans drooled for the alt-rockers' follow-up to their last two hit albums, and the media counted down the days until the CD hit stores in September of that year.
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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;
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Absent sales from the killer titles published by Microsoft and Rockstar, November sales would have dropped more than 20 percent. With the two, revenues rose 11 percent.
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DENVER (Billboard) - There is a reason people still buy CDs  more than they do digital albums. Actually there are several,  but viruses that come along with music via peer-to-peer sites  (P2P) and a concern over digital rights management (DRM) aren't  the only culprits.
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The music industry continues to  build bridges between the digital and physical world.
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Game designers are often called the rock stars of the digital world, but that&#39;s a load of hooey. Rock stars are pop gods and they transcend all bounds of genre to find success in the mainstream.
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Apple has revealed that it has sold more than 150 million songs trough its online music store, iTunes. The company said that iTunes users are now downloading more than four million songs a week, a rate of over 200 million songs a year.