Activision takes a smack at the music industry over Guitar Hero
Techdirt calls out a recent spat between Activision and Warner Music, in which Activision's CEO suggests that the music labels should be paying him to use their content, rather than the inverse.
Techdirt (rightly) supports this, arguing that "The content industry always seem to over estimate how much 'value' the content provides and almost totally ignore the value provided by anyone else in the value chain." Bingo.
My kids can't get into the car with me without having The Smiths, Radiohead, Neil Young, etc. blared at them, but I keep being surprised by the music they're discovering through Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It seems like their entire elementary school grades are rocking to Weezer et al. due to the influence of these games.
Maybe if the record labels would focus on unpaid adoption for a nanosecond they could spend decades reaping the profits.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Gh and RB would be NOTHING without the songs they include. It is ridiculous for musicians to have to pay them for the music to be included, when the game relies on their music to be successful to begin with. half the appeal of the game is the music included, and without that music, nobody would want to play it (as the entire point of the game is to make you feel like a rock God, and how can you do that without any decent songs?).