Activision Boasts Guitar Hero's Music-Selling Power, Seven Studios On Franchise

Music featured in Guitar Hero games causes non-game sales of that music to see several-fold sales boosts, Activision and music label executives claimed during the company's Analyst Day event. Universal Music Group president Zach Horowitz claims that Guitar Hero inclusion takes music sales two to three times higher, and in some cases the influence is much greater -- Weezer's "My Name is Jonas," originally from the group's 1994 debut album and featured in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, saw a tenfold increase. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick also claimed that the standalone title Guitar Hero: Aerosmith resulted in more revenue for the band than any individual Aerosmith album. Along with those statistics, the company announced its plans to triple the amount of its total released Guitar Hero games and content by 2010. Towards that end, the company revealed it has no fewer than seven studios working on the Guitar Hero franchise. Last week, B-Boy developer FreeStyleGames was acquired and will be providing localized content for the upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour. Much of that extra development bandwidth will be focused on ensuring plenty of localized European content will be available, an area in which Activision executives admit the franchise has been lacking. Despite the historically strong success of music games in Europe, the region has so far been underrepresented in terms of Guitar Hero revenue.