It is no longer a secret that the success enjoyed by Guitar Hero and Rock Band means, at the same time, an increase in the sales of the music artists featured in the games. However, it was still unsure whether the same thing happened in case new singles were involved: Motley Crue have decided to test that out and many gamers won't be surprised at all to find out the results.

According to Reuters, the band placed its title track from Saints of Los Angeles as a downloadable Rock Band track in advance of the album's release date - the 24th of June this year. There was also the option to purchase the track via iTunes and Amazon.

After one week, Tenth Street Entertainment, the company that takes care of Motley Crue's management, has provided the official data to public: only the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band has sold more than 47,000 tracks (the PlayStation 3 downloads are unknown at the moment), while the same track has received a bit over 10,000 downloads via iTunes and Amazon. What does this mean? It means that video games have scored an important point against the classic entertainment distribution formats (I'm not claiming that iTunes is a classic music distribution format, though, but it's similar).

"We do research on every artist we have, and the research said that the people who bought Motley Crue music and tickets play Rock Band and video games ... (so) it was our inclination to go there," Tenth Street CEO Allen Kovac says. "As marketers, it's our job to find the audience. If our audience tells us they're sitting at Xbox and PlayStation, that's our job to do that."

It's good to hear that everybody is happy with the situation in the end. And it's also worth noting that, strangely, the Rock Band sales are bigger even though one can only listen to that specific track on his own Xbox, while playing the game, unlike the iTunes, which allow people to go wherever they want with their music.