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Motley Crue Single Selling Bigger on "Rock Band" Than iTunes

May 27, 2008 10:35 AM ET

Perhaps proving that both Rock Band and Guitar Hero as capable of selling music as an iTunes or Amazon, sales of Mötley Crüe's new single "Saints of Los Angeles" have sold five times more copies for Rock Band as it did on iTunes after a month. But sales of "Saints of Los Angeles" aren't just an aberration: Sales of Black Tide's "Shockwave" boast similar stats, with Rock Band's sales trumping iTunes by ten times. "We do research on every artist we have, and the research said that the people who bought Mötley Crüe music and tickets play Rock Band and video games ... (so) it was our inclination to go there," Tenth Street CEO Allen Kovac says. Of course, Rock Band downloads are only available in the game — songs cannot be transferred to portable MP3 players.

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

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