Music Sells Better If Featured in Guitar Hero

At the recent Analyst Day event hosted by Activision Blizzard, the company managed to officially announce the next Call of Duty game without actually telling us anything concrete about it at all. And it also probably managed to drive a few music industry executives to new levels of insanity by pointing out how much better music featured in Guitar Hero does in the sales charts.

Zach Horowitz, who is the president of the Universal Music Group, is the one who made the shocking remark while pointing out that a track like the Weezer created “My Name is Jonas” sold ten times as much when it was featured in the videogame. And that's a lot when taking into account the fact that the track was initially released way back in 1994.

Bobby Kotick, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Activision, claimed that even giants like Aerosmith benefited from an increase in sales when the Guitar Hero game featuring the band was launched. He went on to say that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith brought in more money for the band than any of the individual albums they released in their career.

To capitalize on the success of the music simulation genre and to help drive the music and the videogames industry forward, Activision says that it plans to triple the Guitar Hero themed content that it will have available in 2010. The publisher has recently acquired another development studio, FreeStyleGames, which has previous experience working on B-Boy, to do the much needed localization work on the upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour. There are now a staggering seven studios that are working on various Guitar Hero projects and that number might increase in 2009.

Guitar Hero: World Tour is set to offer gamers the ability to play more instruments than in Guitar Hero III while also allowing them to create custom tracks that they can play and then share with their friends.