Veteran American rockers Mötley Crüe (we have a very complex love and hate relationship with the umlauts) have decided that their next single, called Saints of Los Angeles, will make its debut as a downloadable song for the very popular videogame Rock Band.

The band has seen how people were drawn to simulating being part of a band and decided that this activity was very "rock and roll" so they decided to make it easy for fans to play their new track. Rather than release the single on classic media support and then wait for developer Harmonix to include it in the downloadable song collection sometime in the future, Mötley Crüe decided to release the single directly as a download for both the Xbox and the PlayStation 3 versions of Rock Band.

Since yesterday, Saints of Los Angeles is available on Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store will feature the song from April 17. Both versions will carry the same price of 0.99 dollars and upon purchase the song will be downloaded to the hard drives of the gaming consoles.

Def Leppard, another veteran heavy metal band, this time from England, have decided to use Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock as the avenue to release their next single, called Nine Lives. The song will be released for download by Guitar Hero buyers on April 24, while the retail release will happen about a week later. It seems plans to release the song for Rock Band were scrapped as the game is currently only purchasable in North America with June the release date for Europe.

Downloading songs for the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a growing business. It's estimated that around 6 million songs were downloaded for Rock Band since the game launched in November 2007. Around 80 songs are up for download and Harmonix, the developers of the game, are hard at work adding new and new songs. Such downloadable content that integrates smoothly into a solid gameplay foundation can create long lasting and significant revenue streams for any game company and exclusive releases like that of Mötley Crüe can only enhance the image of the service and the game.