Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Daft Punk Contribute Music, Masks to DJ Hero
There’s one surefire way to control the way your image is used in videogames: Hide behind a mask.
There’s one surefire way to control the way your image is used in videogames: Hide behind a mask.
It began, as it always did, with a phone call to 911.
There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don’t have bylines. These are the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube, and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter.
A week before James Hetfield and Co. are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the metal icons’ Guitar Hero: Metallica videogame hits stores, on March 29. The new addition to the GH franchise boasts 28 controller-shredding songs taken from Metallica’s voluminous catalog as well as band-approved acts including Motorhead, Slayer and Mastodon….Rolling Stone sat down with frontman James Hetfield at SXSW a few hours before Metallica’s epic “surprise” show to find out how he likes his pixellated persona, whether he thinks Death Magnetic sounds better on videogame or record and if he believes encouraging kids to pick up plastic instruments is hurting their chances of learning real ones.
The Singularity–the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal–has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke.
Kanye West’s Twitter, a catalyst in the iTunes sales war between the rapper and “Comedy Central” host Stephen Colbert, allegedly isn’t even West’s own Twitter account. Taking to his blog this weekend, West posted, “I don’t know anything about this…This is not me!!!”
With games like Grand Theft Auto, Rock Band and Guitar Hero tripping over each other to license as much music as possible, at least one eagerly anticipated game is going in the opposite direction.
For Austin rockers Spoon, 2007 was a breakthrough year–but not because they sold a lot of records. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their album on the indie label Merge, garnered more radio play than any disc in their 15-year history and earned them an appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than 10 bucks. And the nation’s largest retailer–which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of goods last year–usually gets its way. Suppliers who don’t accede to Wal-Mart’s “everyday low price” mantra often find their products bounced from the chain’s stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.
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