Business News Labels & Publishers

Music games market down but still buoyant

By | Published on Tuesday 11 May 2010

More sales stats anyone? Record label trade body the BPI published its annual book of facts and stats yesterday, and in it we discover that Ubisoft’s ‘Just Dance’ was the biggest selling ‘music game’ in 2009, despite it only being launched in the latter part of the year. It seems more people would rather dance for real than pretend to play guitar.

That said, various incarnations of the ‘Guitar Hero’ franchise filled six slots in the music game top ten last year, while it’s ‘DJ Hero’ pretend-to-DJ sister title came in at eleven. Though the much hyped Beatles edition of rival pretend-to-play game ‘Rock Band’ only came in at number fifteen, which is surely a bit of a disappointment to EA, MTV Games and EMI, who surely thought they’d have the biggest music game of the year on their hands. Singing along also proved popular in 2009, with ‘Lips’, the Take That version of ‘SingStar’ and a ‘High School Musical’ sing-along game all appearing in the top fifteen.

The music games market was worth £95.1 million in 2009, down from £107.7 million the year before, proof music gaming has peaked following those few months two years ago when everyone was saying “gaming is the future of music”. Still, it’s still a sizable earner for both the music and gaming industries, the former benefiting in particular from the growth in the download stores that accompany the main gaming franchises, meaning labels and music publishers continue to earn from gameplay even after the initial game has been sold. 

Commenting on the music games market in 2009, BPI boss Geoff Taylor told CMU: “The most encouraging trend is the growth of a market for music track purchases direct to consoles to use with existing games and peripherals. ‘Rock Band’ now has over a thousand tracks available to buy, and more than 60 million have been downloaded worldwide in the last two years”.

On developments in the music gaming market, he continued: “Not only is the genre expanding into artist-specific titles – including [those involving] UK acts [like] Take That and Queen – but the enormous success of ‘Tap Tap Revenge’ and ‘Riddim Ribbon’ shows that mobile is also proving its worth as a platform for music-based games”.



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