CMT Blog: Guitar Hero

There was a great article in last week's Billboard magazine about the 100 top ways to get your music in the public eye and how it's no longer just a matter of building relationships at radio stations. What stood out to me was the actual numbers behind some of these marketing moves. Like performing on Oprah (Celine Dion's sales jumped 80 percent), getting your song on American Idol (126,000 combined downloads of Carrie Underwood's "I Told You So" and her duet of the song with Randy Travis) or being the band in Guitar Hero (Metallica's self-titled album sales increased 41 percent after the release of Guitar Hero Metallica.) Even things like having a very integrated tour sponsorship, like Lady Antebellum did with Brita, can set your music career in motion. Cover stories in magazines like Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly are quantifiably good for business, too. I hope newer artists will embrace all these new opportunities while they hang onto some of the traditional ways of getting their music to the masses.

Guitar Hero's nice. But it's pretty focused on, well, guitars. And on hard rock. So if you want to play something a little more pop and maybe even a little more country, you will be very psyched to know that Taylor Swift's "Picture to Burn" will be one of the tracks on Band Hero, a new video game that's kind of a sequel to Guitar Hero. Band Hero will reportedly feature the same kind of drop-in and drop-out instrument game play that GH players know and love. There will be other songs from bands like Lily Allen, the All-American Rejects, the Jackson 5 and plenty more. It's slated for a November release for Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PlayStation PS3, which probably means a lot of Taylor Swift fans will have a very merry Christmas this year.

If you're a country music fan and love singing karaoke, then SingStar Country on PS2 might be for you. The game has 30 songs from artists like Alan Jackson, Johnny Cash, Martina McBride and Taylor Swift. You can play the game with two microphones, making it a fun choice for a party. I played it today along with some other CMT bloggers (getting the absolute lowest score, mind you) and can say that it is definitely an engaging, and at times hilarious, group activity. We sang Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman," Kenny Chesney's "Big Star," Jackson's "Chattahoochee," even "Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Jewel and Jessica Simpson are in there, too. Afterward, some of us commented that it may be a better game for groups than Rock Band or Guitar Hero since the actual music video plays during the game rather than animation. Plus, those not playing don't have to listen to constant clicking of plastic guitar buttons, just suffer through questionable singing. You can sing solo or duet, battle an opponent or play in a pass-the-mic, hot potato mode. Learning is quite easy. Personally, I still prefer the guitar games, but that's only because I'm a horrendous "singer." This thing is a good time.

People who aren't into country music are pretty quick to classify it as "music for soccer moms." As if that's a bad thing. Like soccer moms have no taste, thereby making the music they have chosen to play in their minivans less cool than whatever alt-emo-pop music other folks are listening to. And those folks are partially right. Middle-aged suburban moms do make up a big portion of country radio listeners and are responsible for a lot of what's left of retail CD sales. But those folks are wrong about moms not having enough smarts to recognize good music. Read more...