After NPD Group reported video game sales fell in September versus the previous year, Microsoft released some information on its recent sales stories and boasted its success in music-related games.

Xbox LIVE, the company said, has sold over 80% of the downloadable songs for music games and currently averages 3.8 million music downloads per month. Overall, Xbox 360 users have purchased more than 45 million music downloads for games in the "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" franchises. Between the two franchises, Xbox accounts for over six million copies of the games.

If Microsoft has an 80% market share for these song downloads, the entire market is doing 4.75 million songs per month.

Harmonix sold six million songs downloads for "Guitar Hero" in the first three months downloadable content was available.

In the two and a half months after the release of "Rock Band," reported Billboard in January, users had purchased 2.5 million songs through the game. "Guitar Hero" users had bought over five million songs in about the same time period.

Posted by Glenn at 10:03 AM | Link
|Games|

(Thanks for letting me know I got the games completely wrong. Initial post referenced Guitar Hero. Shows you how much I pay attention to video games, although I did watch "The King of Kong" documentary last night.)

Look over the track listing for Rock Band 2, due out September, and you'll see a very impressive collection of rock songs (it's in this press release, scroll down). Nice to see a handful of indies on there (such as Interpol, from a Matador release, and Silversun Pickups) The big news is Guns N' Roses will debut a new song, "Shackler's Revenge," via the game. Quite a coup for both the game and the format, and a welcome signal that GNR's long-delayed album will finally be released. But...I don't play "Rock Band" or even own a game console. Nor do I want to own one. I can't be disgruntled, though. It makes sense. Games are the new MTV worldwide video premiere.

Posted by Glenn at 12:27 PM | Link
|Games|