Warner Music Says Music Video Games Must Pay More

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Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman said today that video game makers will need to pay more to license songs for music-based video games. Gee, it didn’t take long for greed to overcome the bigwigs at Warner. I wonder who will be next to jump on the “we need more” bandwagon?

"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"
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meh. I give Warner credit for allowing Steve Hoffman to remaster some of their stuff on vinyl, and the recent appeasement attempt towards audiophiles.
Videogames are a pretty big industry right now. Warner knows there are deep pockets. Little surprise there.
 
They can screw off, most good music games have their own music anyways. (iidx, beatmania, djmax, etc...)
 
their games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small"
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Sure, jackass, the games are entirely dependant on the backgroung music. :rolleyes:
 
"Gee, it didn’t take long for greed to overcome the bigwigs at Warner. I wonder who will be next to jump on the “we need more” bandwagon?"

What's the problem with that? There's a large demand for games that feature their songs, and they wanted to be compensated for it. Unless you just want to decry capitalism in general.
 
The fact is that these new music games (like Guitar Heroes and Rock Band) which are already licensed and have provided a massive spike in interest for the songs featured is not compensation enough. You must also pay through the nose because by golly, they are allowing you the gracious use of music their indentured slaves produce.

Seriously folks, this is getting way tiring. Much like the iTMS featuring certain songs, games like Guitar Heroes which feature songs also cause said songs to rise in popularity and interest. It's like the games are paying the music publishers to advertise their songs for them. And of course the publishers want more money for said games to help them advertise the songs. A true WTF moment if there ever was one.

Haven't bought an RIAA song in 10 years, don't plan to start now. F'em.
 
Nemesis999 said:
Sure, jackass, the games are entirely dependant on the backgroung music. :rolleyes:
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Guitar Hero would not have become a franchise if they were using independent artists no one has heard of. People buy it because they get to play Kansas, Nirvana, etc.
 
akugami said:
Seriously folks, this is getting way tiring. Much like the iTMS featuring certain songs, games like Guitar Heroes which feature songs also cause said songs to rise in popularity and interest.
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true.

perhaps this is the underlying reason for the guitar hero world tour 'music creation' mode. aside from the drums though, i use that term loosely.
 
Solution is simple....Artists should have their music published by the gaming industry and cut out the RIAA altogether. :)
 
All this will do is make developers skip over Warner owned music for something cheaper from EMI or whomever else is cheaper.
 
Jaerb4 said:
Unless you just want to decry capitalism in general.
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I know I certainly decry capitalism with it's apparent modern definition of "Money is God, screw the rest of humanity, the rich deserve more, whoever dies with the most cash wins."

It's gone from trying to earn a buck and have a nice life, to something with absolutely no conscience.
 
UrielDagda said:
I know I certainly decry capitalism with it's apparent modern definition of "Money is God, screw the rest of humanity, the rich deserve more, whoever dies with the most cash wins."

It's gone from trying to earn a buck and have a nice life, to something with absolutely no conscience.
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I agree with you, current capitalism is all about greed. I thought capitalism was about making a fair profit for your work, not trying to squeeze every dime out of someeone?
 
Jaerb4 said:
Guitar Hero would not have become a franchise if they were using independent artists no one has heard of. People buy it because they get to play Kansas, Nirvana, etc.
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Thats true, but lets not forget that it's game play was amazingly fresh when it was released in 2005. I think it would have caught on regardless of it's catalog. Now people do play it for the different songs and artists because the formula has been beaten to death. IMHO, the best songs on the original GH were the unlockable tracks by indie groups.
 
Congratulations on your guitar hero purchase.
Your small donation will clothe and feed many homeless songwriters of the 80s and even some of their managers/producers.
 
Of course it cost more since the games are hits. Say it at once! We want more money!!! The Warner group are a bunch of punks in every devision they own.
 
Hmmm, this argument doesn't take into account the increase in downloads that have been shown for songs that appear in Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Using his logic that "their games are entirely dependent on the content" you could say the increase in song download sales are dependent on people playing the games.

To see the impact of having a song in GHIII check out this link describing the jump in sales the music industry enjoys when their songs are featured in the game. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071121-your-song-in-guitar-hero-equals-a-big-jump-in-digital-sales.html

Such a backasswards industry...
 
Is this "more money" going to go to the artists? I don't think so.

I DARE TM to do something right as well as the rest of the grubby music industry.
 
Jimjamm said:
Hmmm, this argument doesn't take into account the increase in downloads that have been shown for songs that appear in Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Using his logic that "their games are entirely dependent on the content" you could say the increase in song download sales are dependent on people playing the games.

To see the impact of having a song in GHIII check out this link describing the jump in sales the music industry enjoys when their songs are featured in the game. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071121-your-song-in-guitar-hero-equals-a-big-jump-in-digital-sales.html

Such a backasswards industry...
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I didn't think of it til you said something, but yeah. The music buiness is making money from video games PROMOTING their music, so what's up with that?
 
UrielDagda said:
I know I certainly decry capitalism with it's apparent modern definition of "Money is God, screw the rest of humanity, the rich deserve more, whoever dies with the most cash wins."

It's gone from trying to earn a buck and have a nice life, to something with absolutely no conscience.
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Capitalism is simply an economic system in which resources are owned by private investors. Warner Brothers and other recording studios own those resources which Guitar Hero is getting rich off of, therefore they can do with it as they'd like.

Conscience has very little to do with anything here, especially since Activision is still doing extremely well and they'll still continue to make boatloads of money. Do you realize how much technology would suck if people were just trying to "earn a buck and have a nice life"? We wouldn't be having this discussion because we'd all be yeoman farmers living in Thomas Jefferson's America.
 
Jaerb4 said:
"Gee, it didn’t take long for greed to overcome the bigwigs at Warner. I wonder who will be next to jump on the “we need more” bandwagon?"

What's the problem with that? There's a large demand for games that feature their songs, and they wanted to be compensated for it. Unless you just want to decry capitalism in general.
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money, we must screw more people out of there money!
 
How much do the record companies actually make from Guitar Hero?

It could be they're making very little so requesting more isn't out of line as most anti-RIAA bandwagoners (as I usually am) would like to think.
 
Well, they compared it with iPods and MTV. Since iTunes charges $0.99 USD per song and MTV doesn't play music anymore, they should average it and charge everyone $0.50 per song on Guitar Hero which would add around $35 to the cost of GH3, for example. That way the record companies get their 'fair share' and the consumers get to pay an additional $35 dollars for the game.

Sales may fall off a tad... I'll stick with Audiosurf.
 
I think a better comparison would be iTunes charging roughly 1/10th of an album per song, so they'd get $6 per GH3 sold? Or whatever they're charging for it.
 
I have prior art on the sequence of buttons red-red-blue. Good luck trying to copyright it.
 
Jaerb4 said:
Capitalism is simply an economic system in which resources are owned by private investors. Warner Brothers and other recording studios own those resources which Guitar Hero is getting rich off of, therefore they can do with it as they'd like.

Conscience has very little to do with anything here, especially since Activision is still doing extremely well and they'll still continue to make boatloads of money. Do you realize how much technology would suck if people were just trying to "earn a buck and have a nice life"? We wouldn't be having this discussion because we'd all be yeoman farmers living in Thomas Jefferson's America.
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To take an economical system and remove all form of human consciousness from it is to defeat the purpose of an economic system. We aren't machines and even a political abstract should recognize it can not be treated as machine-like when it's governing the lives and wills of people.
 
Guaranteed, every time anyone complains about companies raising prices there are a few Social Darwinists that pop up and try to argue in support of the companies. It's incredibly bizarre.
 
Dreaz said:
To take an economical system and remove all form of human consciousness from it is to defeat the purpose of an economic system. We aren't machines and even a political abstract should recognize it can not be treated as machine-like when it's governing the lives and wills of people.
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Humans drive the system. If you dislike what Warner Brothers does, then you tell all your friends and you don't buy their products. If Activision doesn't like what WB is doing, then they find someone who's going to charge less since they already have enough cache in the franchise. This isn't the rich getting richer. If you've got a problem, then stop giving them money. That's exactly what all those non-RIAA music lists are for. You're all acting like they're impeding on a right by being greedy.
 
jimmyb said:
Guaranteed, every time anyone complains about companies raising prices there are a few Social Darwinists that pop up and try to argue in support of the companies. It's incredibly bizarre.
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Eugenics is disgusting and nasty, and has absolutely nothing to do with this.
 
I don't see why they don't take this opportunity for Better than free advertisement! These games use the music and do interactive based learning, there have been more than a hand full of tracks that I've bought just because of the game (Priests, Lay Down). The game maker has to pay for the song, we end up buying the game and reply it over and over and over.

As long as their IP isn't easily extractable from the game then end users would be forced to seek the songs externally, its up to the company to make sure that they buy it instead of stealing it.

I'm pretty sure that these games have caused a noticeable surge in sales.

P.S. Although its not as easy I'm sure you could find many good independent artists (like emusic) and of companies that have yet take a bigger cookie out of the money jar to try and forget Warner for now.
 
Jaerb4 said:
Capitalism is simply an economic system in which resources are owned by private investors. Warner Brothers and other recording studios own those resources which Guitar Hero is getting rich off of, therefore they can do with it as they'd like.

Conscience has very little to do with anything here, especially since Activision is still doing extremely well and they'll still continue to make boatloads of money. Do you realize how much technology would suck if people were just trying to "earn a buck and have a nice life"? We wouldn't be having this discussion because we'd all be yeoman farmers living in Thomas Jefferson's America.
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And so it sowed the seeds of its own destruction within the dilution of man into a commodity himself, and not just the objects of his consumption that he was brought up to see as the goal in life by capitalism's permeation of every facet of american life.

It amuses me to read the predictions that the communists will beat us at the capitalist game quite soon. Not only is their wealth increasing, but so is the rate at which they are aquiring it. Every time Forbes drops the figure, from them overtaking us in 2020, to 2015, and now 2010-12 if the current rate is constant.

Thats less than a year and a half. And they own most of our debt.

Dont you love economics? The end result, the most common and predictable denominator between american family, relationships, religion, politics, jobs, mental health, and the sedentarily cultivated response of happiness to consumption... is greed.

All that an american is worth to an american is $$. Because when you're kept at the edge of impoverishment for efficiency's sake in an economy defendant on the top 3% owning over 95% of the national wealth, you realize that it was engineered this way.

Poverty makes people controllable. You play a consumption-fed game of brinksmanship with your well being every time you take a sick day.

So, like middle-class white Joe who realized he's given up ever right to privacy he's ever had in the name of not being seen as a pro-pedophile, pro-terrorist, or pro-communist, we realize that our privacy was the last piece that defined the non-mass-commercialism or consumability of our soul, and now, we're truly nothing.

If its not commercially profitable to support your ideas, its commercially profitable to destroy them. You are walking dollar signs.

Lastly, I fear I am not much better, and until we can design replicators and cultivate a star-trek-like society run on reason and ethics based on whats better for people as a whole, I'll still be here consuming my diet dr. pepper, thinking about how one bottle is worth about 1/20th of my hour of work. I wonder if it will ever be possible to truly disassociate from materialism, short of becoming the Buddha himself.
 
Good god. I'm not going to get into a political debate here, but I don't think you understand economics at all. The poverty gap is decreasing and US citizens are the ones who own most of our debt, followed by Japan and then "the communists."
 
Well at least this is unlikely to happen with Sony Music, as paying themselves off would be kind of silly....

If this becomes a trend, this could push developers to hire composers to create their own original music, which I'm usually in favor of.

Then again it could lead to some incredibly uninspired background noise made by the lowest bidding composers. :(
 
Jaerb4 said:
Eugenics is disgusting and nasty, and has absolutely nothing to do with this.
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Social Darwinism doesn't just apply to eugenics (although it is perhaps most well known for this). It applies to all aspects of society as the name suggests.

Any this is pretty off topic, so carry on...
 
Steve said:
Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman said today that video game makers will need to pay more to license songs for music-based video games. Gee, it didn’t take long for greed to overcome the bigwigs at Warner. I wonder who will be next to jump on the “we need more” bandwagon?
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if things go as planned. we could see the demise of Rockstar, singstar, DDR, guitar hero and all that other lame shit i'd be glad to see the arse-end off... AWESOME!!!!! about time one of these bigwigs did something that pleased me for once
 
Warner is only one of the "big 5" If the other 4 music companies keep their mouth's shut then they should sea a nice 20% pop in their business. Theres tons of music out there and Warner only owns a fraction of it. I say screw em if they want to whine and complain they lose all the benifits that goes along with introducing young people 15-25 to music from their 60's and 70's catalog
 
Bristinwolf said:
I say screw em if they want to whine and complain they lose all the benifits that goes along with introducing young people 15-25 to music from their 60's and 70's catalog
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awesome point.... hahahahhaha... it's not even modern music in these games...
 
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