14 DAY TRIAL // Music games are extremely popular these days, as they bring a lot of benefits for everyone involved in them. The player gets a great experience, the companies responsible for them get a lot of profit and the bands or artists that bring their music to them get new fans.
But seeing as how the business of downloadable content for music games has really taken off in terms of number of downloads and popularity, the British Official Charts Company has revealed that it has plans for the DLC system. As such, it has recently declared, through the voice of its chart director, Omar Maskatiya, that it plans to include song downloads to analyze the bulk of popularity that new songs are enjoying when they are released.
“We have been in discussion with record labels and the various games companies that host games which allow users to download master recording versions of artist tracks,” Maskatiya said. “In theory they could be eligible to be combined with downloads of the same tracks that take place from the wide range of digital retailing services that currently make up our chart panel.”
As such, every time you download a song for your own copy of Rock Band, Guitar Hero or SingStar, the chart company will consider it valid in the same way as buying the song off of iTunes or from the retail store. This will allow for a much better analysis of any song's popularity with its target consumer base, believes the British Official Charts Company.
While this idea may seem a bit simple in theory, don't forget that there are a lot of issues to be dealt with considering the many companies involved in releasing the downloadable content and hosting it – from the likes of Activision and Harmonix, which develop such music games, to Sony or Microsoft, which deliver the songs through their online networks like the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live.
Do you believe that this measure of counting downloads from music games will benefit the music industry as a whole or will it just add another layer of complications over it, especially in terms of pop songs or other genres that aren't predominantly featured in music games?