Guitar Hero edition's first-week sales more than tripled those of its band's last studio album
Traditional sales on permanent vacation?
The latest Guitar Hero game, which focuses heavily on songs by top rockers Aerosmith, racked up first-week sales that more than tripled those of the band's most recent studio album, Rolling Stone reports.
More than half a million plastic-guitar-toting consumers took home copies of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith during the week following its release on June 29, compared with just 160,500 for Aerosmith's Honkin' on Bobo album, released in March 2004. Gross sales figures show an even more dramatic gulf: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, at $50 a game, generated more than $25 million, while Honkin' on Bobo only managed $2 million.
Aerosmith isn't the only group to have found sales success with music games. 1980s glam legends Motley Crue released their recent Saints of Los Angeles single for download to Guitar Hero competitor Rock Band before launching it in more conventional formats, and made headlines when the Rock Band version outsold iTunes and Amazon downloadable versions five to one. The news prompted Allen Kovac, of Motley Crue's management company, to comment to Rolling Stone: "Pretty soon, this is going to be the way you sell music."
