May 7, 2010 – Hits from Blur, Gorillaz and Calvin Harris helped Ubisoft’s ‘Just Dance’ for Nintendo Wii become the UK’s biggest-selling music game in 2009, with Nintendo’s Wii console also grabbing the lion’s share of sales from the burgeoning music gaming market, worth £95.1m in 2009.
The BPI’s forthcoming Statistical Handbook 2010, set to be published on May 10, 2010, showed that more than 4.1m music games were sold in the UK during 2009. This equated to a 6.4% share of all games sold that year, down only 0.1% from 2008 when music games revenues totalled £107.7m.
Of the leading three platforms, Wii games sold more than 1,546,000 copies with a retail value of £35.9m in total. This compared to 819,000 sales for Microsoft Xbox360, worth £25.1m and 719,000 units sold for Sony PS3 valued at £18.2m.
Of the best-selling ten music games of the year, six were from Activision Blizzard’s ‘Guitar Hero’ series. The strength of Take That’s repertoire also helped propel their ‘SingStar’ game into the Top 10.
Whilst ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’ was pipped to the top of the chart in its week of release by ‘Guitar Hero 5’, it was a global smash with an estimated 1.7m copies sold worldwide from September to the end of 2009, including more than 1m tracks downloaded.
Geoff Taylor, BPI Chief Executive said, “The biggest music gaming event in 2009 was the launch of The Beatles: Rock Band, the first time the band had made their music available in a digital format. Not only is the genre expanding into artist-specific titles, including UK acts Take That and Queen, but the enormous success of ‘Tap Tap Revenge’ and ‘Riddim Ribbon’ shows that mobile is also proving its worth as a platform for music-based games.
“The most encouraging trend is the growth of a market for music track purchases direct to consoles to use with existing games and peripherals. Rock Band now has over a thousand tracks available to buy, and more than 60 million have been downloaded worldwide in the last two years.”
Michael Rawlinson, Director General of ELSPA said, “The videogame industry is very adept at evolving into new areas of interactive entertainment and music games are a prime example. Music videogames are a fantastic industry success and are providing enjoyment and entertainment for families across the UK.”
Kim Bayley, Director General of the Entertainment Retailer’s Association added, “The success of music games shows consumers want new, more immersive and interactive experiences from entertainment. It also shows how enthusiastically they respond to new product innovation.”
In the six years since Sony’s ‘Singstar’ kickstarted the genre, music has moved from being the soundtrack for videogames to taking centre stage as the very thing that games are built around.
Along with ‘Guitar Hero’ which launched in 2005 and ‘Rock Band’, which debuted in 2007, there are now three major, established gaming franchises with music as their core component – all battling for their share of a UK market worth around £100m annually.
ENDS
NOTES FOR EDITORS
Data source
GfK Chart-Track, copyright ELSPA.
For further information on BPI, please contact
Adam Liversage on 020 7803 1326 / 0780 1179032 or email adam.liversage@bpi.co.uk.
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About the Statistical Handbook 2010
Published each year and free to BPI members, the BPI Statistical Handbook 2010 retails at £70 and is available to order online from the BPI’s own webstore at http://bpi.co.uk/shop or by calling the BPI direct on 020 7803 1395. Past editions of the Handbook are also available.
About BPI
The BPI is the representative voice of the UK recorded music business. We are a trade organisation funded by our members - which include hundreds of independent music companies and the UK’s four major record labels. BPI members account for approximately 90% of all recorded music sold in the UK, and globally the UK's recorded music market is the third biggest.
The BPI also organises the annual BRIT Awards show as well as the Classical BRIT Awards show. The organising company BRIT Awards Limited, is a fully owned subsidiary of the BPI. Substantial proceeds from both shows go to the BRIT Trust, the charitable arm of the BPI that has donated almost £15m to charitable causes nationwide, since its foundation in 1989.