Boost To The Music Industry

But the biggest evidence of both games’ incredible success may be the millions of songs that have downloaded in the wake of Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. In January, Activision announced that more than 5 million songs have been downloaded for Guitar Hero III’s bonus content. Just recently, original Guitar Hero developer Harmonix announced that Rock Band’s downloadable content have surpassed 6 million songs since the game was released in November. And those figures don’t include follow-up sales of albums and songs featured in the games, which gamers have purchased after playing the music.

That is perhaps the best by-product of the Guitar Hero phenomenon: the fact that it’s inspiring kids to play music and given to the music industry a big boost. Brad Tolinski, editor in chief of Guitar World Magazine, says the game has been a major boom for catalog music. "I know it’s spurring on sales," he said, adding that when songs like "My Name Is Jonah" from Weezer pop up on the digital sales charts, "I can’t imagine any other reason songs like that would pop up on that chart other than Guitar Hero popularity." Tolinski said the games are particularly beneficial for newer and lesser known bands. "The band Dragon Force has gotten a boost because their song, ’Through the Fire and the Flames’ is the ultimate Guitar Hero song," he said. "It’s the most challenging track on Guitar Hero, and all these kids are aspiring to play it."

It appears that nothing can slow down the rise of these music games - not even legal problems. Gibson Guitar recently made headlines by filing two separate patent infringement lawsuits over Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Claiming that the games infringe on its 1999 patent for a virtual music player device, Gibson first sued Guitar Hero publisher Activision, and the game publisher filed a counter-suit (Gibson’s patent describes technology that lets users "simulate participation in a concert by playing a musical instrument and wearing a head-mounted 3-D display that includes stereo speakers.").

Then Gibson filed suit against seven major U.S. retailers, including Wal-Mart and Target, to prevent the stores from selling any of the music games. And most recently, Gibson sued Harmonix, Electronic Arts, and MTV Networks over Rock Band. Ironically, Gibson has worked closely with Activision to make custom controllers for the games based on the famous Gibson Les Paul and Kramer guitar models. In fact, Gibson’s logo is still featured on the Guitar Hero III Web site. So it seems that even when people attack Guitar Hero and Rock Band, they still want to be part of the phenomenal success.