"Rock Band" Franchise Exceeds $1 Billion In Sales Before Beatles Game Arrives

While the record-sales biz continues its steady slide, the music video game industry is booming. In a press release, the makers of Rock Band have revealed that after only 15 months of business, the franchise has surpassed $1 billion in North American retail sales alone. MTV Games and Harmonix also announced than more than 40 million individual tracks had been downloaded and purchased via the Rock Band platform.

Rolling Stone has been covering the battle between Guitar Hero and Rock Band and their constant search for exclusive rights to major artists' catalogs and new features. But the numbers don't lie, and in 2008 Rock Band was "the number one title of 2008 by revenue across all game genres," according to the press release. Of course, 2007's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was the first video game ever to break the billion-dollar barrier, so we guess that's a tie.

Whatever the revenue gap between RB and GH is now, expect it fluctuate as both titles release big-name versions this year: Guitar Hero: Metallica hits shelves March 29th (James Hetfield talks that game here) and The Beatles: Rock Band, perhaps the most-anticipated game in either franchise's history, will be released on September 9th, 2009. To counter, Guitar Hero reportedly has a Van Halen-dedicated version on the way.

As the pair continue slugging it out, the music video game market will get even more crowded when both DJ Hero and Scratch: The Ultimate DJ enter the arena later this year.

Related Stories:

• Metallica's James Hetfield Calls "Guitar Hero" a "Gateway Drug": Inside the Band's New Game
• "Guitar Hero: Van Halen" Reportedly On the Way
• "The Beatles: Rock Band" Set to Hit Stores September 9, 2009

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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