Guitar Hero Breeds a New Kind of Bar Band

Houston guitar salesman (and cover band guitarist) Michael J. Juarez, who, unlike Arnold, had played Rock Band, gives the games a bit more credit. "I think it will teach people to learn rhythm, to be able to coordinate their left and right hands," he says.

"Real guitars are for old people."

— Eric Cartman of South Park

Or are they?

Rockin' Robin's Arnold is not as opposed to these games as he might sound. Guitar Hero specifically has sparked a sales boom at his shop. "They wanna graduate out of the game and get a real guitar, so it is kind of helpful for us. We get kids in here all the time wanting Gibson Les Paul Sunbursts, because that's the guitar in the game." (Actually, there are numerous Gibson models in the game, thanks to their canny endorsement deal. Wisely, Gibson's rival guitar maker Fender inked a similar deal with Rock Band.) "I also had some of the [Guitar Hero] songbooks in here, and they flew out of here."

Few people younger than 25 bother with the radio, so for many, videogame soundtracks have filled the vacuum. What's more, there's a difference in intensity between hearing a song through your computer, iPod speakers, or on the radio and experiencing it in an interactive music game. Pretending to play a song, especially along with or in front of your friends, is a much more visceral experience.

Record companies have taken notice. Labels love the fact that these games have a limited number of songs on the soundtracks and that players will hear each one many times over the duration of their interest in the game.

And so now there is a bit of a scramble to land songs on these soundtracks. It wasn't always such: On the original Guitar Hero, the soundtrack was almost entirely composed of sound-alike recordings of famous (and many not-so-famous) songs, with a few utterly obscure bonus tracks coming from the bands of the game's programmers and their friends.

Since that game was such a success, the labels have been much keener to allow the use of master recordings. On Guitar Hero III, more than 50 of the 71 songs on the game are the originals, and even the notoriously protective and expensive Rolling Stones licensed a master to Rock Band.

Music retail is likewise getting aboard. iTunes has cobbled together 75 of the songs from each of the games in one of its "Essentials" playlists, so fans can find and download most of the songs with ease. Playable versions of songs are also available—for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 users, Rock Band offers new music for download every week. In eight weeks, more than 2.5 million songs were sold for use on Rock Band, and some of the charts have been host to a surreal invasion of old guitar rock.

Unless they have been specifically re-released to radio, as Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was in the wake of Wayne's World in 1992, Billboard doesn't allow old songs to recur on their "bricks and mortar" sales chart.

Billboard has no such restriction on digital sales, and especially right after Christmas, when both Guitar Hero III and Rock Band were top sellers, that chart displayed a definite Guitar Hero effect. The lower end of the top 200 singles was littered with songs from the games—everything from hoary classic rock chestnuts such as the spooky 41-year-old Stones dirge "Paint It Black" and Foghat's riff-a-riffic cock rocker "Slow Ride" to Metallica's "One" and "Enter Sandman" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" to Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine" and "Welcome to the Jungle."

Even the two most overplayed songs in American radio history enjoyed a sales bump: Apparently, there were 23,000 Americans who both did not already own and were not sick to painful death of "Free Bird" and "Stairway to Heaven," a fact that says as much about the death of rock radio as it does the power of Guitar Hero.

If you apprise Allen Hill of stats and figures like that, he'll laugh and say something like this: "Yeah, but can you break a string in the middle of a song in Guitar Hero?

"The old man in me gets more and more pronounced every year," adds the 30-something. "Part of the point of playing music is getting there, the journey, and toiling away and then finally getting to the point where you say, 'Wow, cool, I can do that.' And learning things like how to tune an instrument."