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Warner Music Wants More Royalties

Posted by Cole Stryker

File this one under "Still Not Getting It".

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warner Music Group Corp, the world's third-largest music company, said on Thursday that video game makers will need to pay more to license songs for music-based video games like "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band."
Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman drew comparisons between MTV's launch 25 years ago or Apple Inc's iPod launch five years ago, and today's video game companies like Activision Blizzard Inc and Harmonix, a unit of Viacom Inc.
"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though their games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small"

Presumably these additional tariffs will be passed on to players, resulting in pricier song downloads.

I don't think Warner realizes what a good thing it has going with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. This is perhaps the one market for music that can be said to be in a growth stage, and now they want to snuff it out when they should be nurturing it with giveaways, tie-ins and purchase incentives. Warner threatens to pull their music from future releases if they are not appropriately compensated for their tunes. Criminy, how else do they expect to turn kids on to Aerosmith? As usual, the music industry opts for short-term gains and long-term losses.

An alternative strategy: release more content at the current price, reaping higher profits at almost no additional cost.

(via Reuters)

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Posted Aug 08 2008, 08:00 PM

Filed under: guitar hero, rock band, cole stryker, aerosmith, warner

Comments

Demaar said:

The solution is simple: MTV and Activision need to blackball Warner. Sure, it'll mean missing out on a large catalogue of songs (some of which from bands I love), but this shit needs to be ended before it becomes a problem.

August 17, 2008 11:04 PM

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