Well The Beatles Rock Band has been in the Hype Machine for some time now, with a scheduled and memorable release date of 09.09.09. As mentioned above, I’m thrilled at the prospect of a new generation coming to discover the most prolific rock band of all rock bands… in Rock Band…

This new trailer is an artistic, beautiful, and nostalgic look back at The Beatles’ career, directed by Pete Candleland (he did a lot of work with Gorillaz). It starts off as a pretty literal translation of their adventures, and then turns into an acid trip about 70% through… which I guess would be about on par for The Beatles’ career. Regardless of if you like giant bipedal blue elephants or not, the artistry is brilliant and the trailer is epic.

The Beatles Rock Band Trailer is a post from: wax&wires

From Coldplay.com:

Good morning. We’re very pleased to announce that a special Coldplay game for the iPhone and iPod Touch arrived in the iTunes App Store this morning. Tap Tap Revenge: Coldplay Edition is the latest release in the wildly popular Tap Tap Revenge series, which allow you to tap along to songs on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Click here to check it out.

This special edition features ten full Coldplay songs to play along to, with graphics and effects inspired by the band’s videos. It also includes a Coldplay news feed (taken from this very website) and Facebook Connect, so that you can flaunt your scores to the world. The songs included are as follows:

- Lovers In Japan (Osaka Sun Mix)
- Lost!
- In My Place
- Fix You
- Life In Technicolor ii
- Clocks
- Yellow
- Shiver
- Speed Of Sound
- Viva La Vida
- Vida La Vida (Thin White Duke Remix)

The game is available in iTunes stores worldwide and is retailing for £2.99p in the UK, 3.99 Euros in Europe and $4.99 in the US. Click here to purchase it from your local iTunes store. (By the way, we’ve played it and it’s really very good.)

Players can also enter the Tapulous Coldplay Edition Contest to win some rather impressive prizes. Grand prize includes front row tickets to any Viva La Vida Tour concert this summer and an autographed copy of the Viva la Vida Prospekt’s March edition. Find out more about the Tapulous Coldplay Edition Contest here.

Anchorman

ps – If you want to pit your scores against ours, look out for ColdplayAnchorman on the Global leaderboards…

Coldplay Intros Tap Tap Revenge For iPhone is a post from: wax&wires

Here’s how it breaks down:

• 614 songs included on discs and the in-game music store
• 269 artists represented
• 40 million paid songs sold
• 11 albums released to RockBand (AC/DC Live, The Cars, Motley Crue, Foo Fighters, Pixies, Judas Priest, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Megadeth, Rush, No Doubt, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and custom compilations from The Who, Nirvana, The Grateful Dead, Boston)

I’m not surprised at all to see the game succeeding so well, and would even argue that RockBand and Guitar Hero present very unique oportunities for artists to promote thier music in a market in which it’s increasingly tough to cut through the noise.

The entertainment industry is changing. Video games are no kiddie-time joke anymore. Gaming is a big boy industry opperating on the same plane as movies and music; and they deserve the same ammount of respect. One of the most notable differences is that the Video Game industry is on the rise, and music and movies seem to be on the decline with regards to revenue and entertainment marketshare.

Think of some of your favorite bands right now. How did you first hear about them? Yael Naim broke through after scoring her song in the MacBook Air commercial. I first heard Sigur Ros on the Vanilla Sky soundtrack. M.I.A. blew up after landing “Paper Planes” in Pineapple Express. You get the idea. Bands that can push songs on other mediums are able to gain exposure and success in new markets, translating that success into album sales.

Is there an outlet you could be tapping to promote your music? Don’t wait for somebody special to stumble upon your MySpace page; there are 5 billion other bands doing the same thing and that ship has long sailed. Get on Google, look up indie film festivals, independent game developers and conferences, etc. Email them offering your songs to be featured in their films and games. Who knows? One of them might just blow up, carrying your tracks with it.

RockBand Surpasses 40M Songs & $1B in Sales is a post from: wax&wires

Guitar Hero: Metallica

After strong sales, but notably bad publicity with regards to the audio quality of their latest album, Death Magnetic, perhaps this will give Metallica an opportunity to re-establish the album to their fans. Many thought that the album was way over-compressed, and even the Guitar Hero version of the songs (released later for an additional $18) sounded better. Oh, how the worlds are colliding.

A month or so back, I posted an article, Video Games Will Save Us?, on the status of sales within the music industry. Music sales are down overall, but I’m convinced that one of the new ways to make money in music is through licensing songs to video games. We’ve seen countless artists release singles to Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Huge bands like Aerosmith and Metallica even have their own custom versions of the games, featuring only their songs. I’m sure they fetch a higher royalty rate off of those game sales as well, not to mention the increased exposure and potential for increasing album sales to a new generation. Now, if they don’t already, when will the RIAA begin to count those sales towards your next platinum album?

Smart move on Metallica’s part. Can you think of a new and creative way to work around direct sales and make money off of your songs?

Metallica Joins The Guitar Hero List (aka: the new way to make money in music) is a post from: wax&wires

The four best remixes will each win a XBOX 360 and a copy of the new Street Fighter IV game. Runners-up will win copies of Street Fighter IV.

You’ll need to be a trackitdown member, but that’s free. The deadline is February 2nd, so go grab some 8-bit nostalgic magic here.

And for those of you hunting, there’s 200 SFX samples, so I’ll save you the trouble and tell you look in the SFX_60′s for the stuff we all remember.

Remix Street Fighter II For A XBOX 360 is a post from: wax&wires

I’ve always struggled with Guitar Hero. The button moves often times seemed counterintuitive, moving down the fretboard to generate a higher pitch and so on. Ever since it came out, I’ve been wanting somebody to develop a box that would do a quick FFT analysis on the guitar, turn it into MIDI data and make a real guitar usable in Guitar Hero. The technology’s been there, with piezo pickups and MIDI converter boxes; we’ve all seen those used with Roland GK-2 Guitar Synth products. 

Well finally, at CES last week, the product I’d been waiting for was announced. Disney and Washburn have partnered together to create Disney Star Guitarist. The game lets users play real instruments in a Guitar Hero-esque video game. 

We’ve seen a slew of music-related products and games announced over the past few weeks, and I think it’s very encouraging. The recent trend in creative software shows a lot of potential toward drumming up (pun intended) a lot of enthusiasm for kids in their pursuit of music. I think back to when I learned to type. It wasn’t staring at the keyboard memorizing the home row that taught me how to type. It was games like Mario Teaches Typing, and wasting my days on AIM that gave my fingers the familiarity with the keyboard. This game has all the potential of becoming the “Mario Teaches Typing” for guitar playing. 

Other developers are rumored to be working on similar products. GameTank’s Guitar Rising recently won a Developer’s Choice Award at the Independent Game Conference in Austin.

I think the competition will be healthy for the end products. Disney will likely win out simply due to the money that the corporation has behind it and the press that they can generate. As we’ve seen with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, there’s even room in the market for more than one game to be successful. All they need to focus on is putting out a quality product, and getting some big name bands and songs licensed to help them sell games.

Piano and vocal versions of the game are also expected to follow shortly.

For the full wired.com article, click here.

Finally, Guitar Hero For Real Guitars! is a post from: wax&wires

- a better tuning system for 8-bit mode
- a better tuning system for 16-bit mode
- the ability to set the pitchbend in terms of semitones, via MIDI CC
- the ability to set the octave division in terms of discrete pitches per octave, via MIDI CC
- the ability to set the frequency value for any of the four registers via MIDI CC – handy for filter automation etc

A 16-bit filter is demonstrated in the video, as well as noise on four channels. Awesome stuff if you’re into bit-crushing and lo-fi.

For more details, check out Sebastian’s blog here.

Atari POKEY Chip Controlled From Ableton Live is a post from: wax&wires

1) Legal downloads are growing faster than illegal downloads. The amount of music shared via legal methods grew by 29%, where as growth in illegal music downloads via P2P networks rose by 23%. When you think of how many people are using P2P services to pirate music, that 23% is scary; but if this trend continues, we’ll see the gap between legal and illegal music sharing close. Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD, remarked:

“The industry has managed to constrain the number of people who are file sharing, but the expanded use of services such as Bit Torrent enable entrenched P2P users to download a growing number of files.”

That would actually be good news. For piracy to decline we need less people pirating, not less files to pirate. We have to combat the ethical apathy toward piracy, not the system by which people pirate. There will always be new systems, so you have to shift the paradigm that nothing is wrong with creating the P2P network in the first place. The lack of growth in the number of file sharers supports the notion that people are less okay with file sharing, and the increase in files shared is just that; the same file sharers that have always been sharing, simply sharing more files.

What makes me a bit more nervous is a potential indicator with regards to the culture of music piracy. The study found that among 13 to 17-year-olds, P2P file sharing was up 46%, which makes me wonder if Crupnick’s quote above is just a big spin job. That 46% is a staggering number and is evidence that the younger cyber-savvy generation, the one that the industry used to target as the demographic with a “disposable income”, has no qualms with pirating digital media. Not that Hannah Montana and The Jonas Brothers need to sap any more of their money, but it could project itself to bigger problems down the line. In 10 to 20 years, when that generation grows into the one running major corporations, raising families, paying the bills, will they mature out of piracy or will old habits die hard? If the numbers continue as they are, the report is foreshadowing a time when those that are willing to pay for music have died off, or at least become an irrelevant minority to society as a whole. These 13 to 17-year-olds may have kids and pass on their moral compass in such a way that future generations will see P2P networks as the proper means of digital media acquisition.

2) Fifteen percent of Internet users purchased music from online music stores like iTunes and AmazonMP3, which is up 2% from 2007 (about 2.8 million more music-download customers). That’s an encouraging increase, but we’ll see how that changes as the 13 to 17-year-old demographic above presents itself as the socially contributing majority. Also, bear in mind that in 2008 we are still at only 73.6% of population penetration with regards to internet users in North America. That means that the increase of 2% in legal music purchasers might be a relatively insignificant increase when compared to the growth in the overall number of internet users. Are the people in that 2% increase new internet users that will set a new trend for music acquisition? Are they the same new internet users that simply haven’t discovered P2P yet? Or is that 2% increase made up by the long-time net users who may not be the generation that will set the trend for decades to come?

3) CD sales declined by 19% when compared to Q307. We’ve known for some time now that CDs, and hard media in general, were of increasing obsolescence. This stat confirms that presumption and shows a day in the near future where digital downloaded media will be the premier way for music acquisition. This has a lot of implications for independent artists, as one of the main incentives for seeking a major label deal was music distribution. Without hard media to distribute on trucks and into stores, the playing field is leveled a bit and the gap between independent artists and world acts is narrowed.

CD sales dropped among teens by 34%, among adults age 26-35 by 36%, and among adults age 36+ by only 10%. Across all markets, CD sales were down. It’s very clear that the next middle-aged generation will not be turning to CDs as a primary means of getting their music, and CDs will decline from there with the rise of even younger generations less familiar with the idea of hard media.

4) Internet users’ demand for music fell 2% compared to Q307. Again, I’m not sure what all is taken into account with these stats. If this stat simply looks at music purchases online, if it includes those made in brick and mortar stores, or if they include music streaming services like Pandora. If they included music streaming service, which to me is definitely a part of music demand at large, I would be concerned. If not, I wouldn’t be as alarmed, as many of my friends have even turned to Pandora as their sole music provider. While that does mean a loss of potential sales by simply streaming music you like rather than buying albums to find new music, it correlates to an increase in music discovery and interest, which is good for the industry through a myriad of other avenues. So all that said, I’m not sure how they measure a decrease in music demand and we can hope it’s not a genuine decrease. If it is, our hope would be that the younger demographics measured would be the ones with heightened musical interest, since they will be the ones dictating the course of the industry for years to come.

And now, the title point:

5) The music and dance genre was the best-selling genre in video games, with 16% of total software sales for the year. 22% of music buyers and 35% of consumers under the age of 35 said that they had played a music-based game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero within the past three months. Several out of that same group reported that they liked the game and discovered new music through the video game that they later purchased. Hopefully by “purchased” they don’t mean downloaded from LimeWire.

This marks a trend that the music industry needs to adopt on a much larger scale. How to promote and distribute music in brand new and creative ways. There is no way that 10 years ago you could have told me that video games would be a primary means of music discovery, promotion, and distribution. Now, there’s a Guitar Hero sountrack in the top albums rack at my local Best Buy.

What is another, even more creative way of promoting and distributing your music? What steps can you take to make that happen?

Those are my thoughts, highlights and comments on the NPD report, which you can read for yourself here.

Video Games Will Save Us? is a post from: wax&wires