"Guitar Hero" Makers Want to Compete With iTunes

After selling 20 million copies and earning over a billion dollars, Activision Blizzard, the company behind Guitar Hero, think the next logical step for the franchise is to open up an iTunes-like digital music store. "I don't think there have been a lot of credible alternatives to iTunes, but Guitar Hero certainly has that potential," Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard said, adding that "the natural evolution" of the franchise would be to create an online music platform. Activision Blizzard was formed yesterday as the result of the merger between Activision (the distributors of the Guitar Hero franchise) and Vivendi Games, the group responsible for World of Warcraft and the gaming arm of the company that also owns Universal Music. No solid plans are in place, but considering the business they've already done, the true competitor to the Apple empire may have just entered the arena.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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