Hey folks, in case you’re not following along on The Twitters, I wanted to let you know I’ve recorded and released three new songs. You can buy them at Bandcamp or iTunes — and they should be hitting Amazon soon. I hope you enjoy them. And if you like what you hear, you’ll probably want to follow @HighGroundMusic or visit www.johnnyhighground.com every now and then, because at some point I’ll forget to post something important here.
Thanks for listening.
Oh, hello there. No, I’m still on hiatus, but I thought you’d be interested to know that I guested on the most recent episode of The Rumble Pack podcast. We talked quite a bit about music games, so I suspect it will be relevant to your interests. You can learn, for example, how much I enjoyed Band Hero!
Have a listen, and enjoy!
[Listen]
I really hate that term, I have to say. Nevertheless, here’s Amazon’s Cyber Monday page. Looks like there’s another music game going up today: One of the deals starting at 4:20 Pacific (7:20 Eastern) says “Rock out with John Lennon’s guitar.” And Rock Band 3 (game only) is still $40 at Amazon on 360 and PS3, and $35 on Wii! To top that off, there are some pretty massive Guitar Hero deals
The Hero Feed’s Cyber Monday Roundup | Joystiq’s Cyber Monday Feed | Kotaku’s Cyber Monday Roundup
Holy cats, this was unexpected. News came out this morning from a Viacom earnings call that the media giant is “in talks with several buyers” to sell off Rock Band maker Harmonix. During the call, Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman also said that he expected the sale to be completed “expeditiously,” but offered no further details on potential buyers, pricing, or basically anything.
Harmonix themselves have commented only briefly, with communications manager John Drake posting the following in the forums:
This morning’s announcement does not affect the ongoing work at the studio as we continue to support our existing franchises, Rock Band and Dance Central. As stated earlier, Viacom is in discussions with several potential buyers and will continue to fully support the business until a sale is completed.
UPDATE: Here’s another quote from Drake in the forums:
Regarding potential publishers, it’s premature to discuss specific publishers at this time, though we look forward to working with Viacom to find the best home for our studio. Please keep speculation about that to a minimum in this conversation.
Many of you have asked about DLC. To be clear, our earlier statement that we will continue to support our existing franchises holds true and work at the studio is not affected by this announcement. RB DLC will continue unabated. We’re excited to confirm that The BeeGees are our next DLC pack.
Some of you have been chiming in about our different partners and what this announcement means for [the Fender Squier/Mad Catz Hardware/EA Distribution]. Those partnerships are unaffected by this announcement with regards to existing titles.
Most importantly, the Rock Band and Dance Central will continue to be worked on at Harmonix for the foreseeable future. We’re not leaving them behind.
Of course I’ll update as more info comes in. But until then, consider this your discussion and speculation thread.
I’ll start by saying that although this may sound like a big scary deal, the ultimate effect when it comes to us consumers is probably going to be pretty negligible. The association with MTV probably helped Rock Band secure some music licenses at the very beginning, but the franchise is very much its own brand now and is likely to do just fine wherever Harmonix ends up. As for where that might be…my strong suspicion is EA, simply because Harmonix has had a distribution relationship with EA in the past, and because EA is a huge company that seems to let acquired studios do what they do with little interference from above. (See BioWare for a recent example.)
How about you?
[Read, via @toymachinesh]
I’ve talked before about how all those reports of the music-game genre being in sharp decline are missing a big part of the picture — namely DLC purchases and non-bundled hardware sales. But it looks like that’s going to be changing this month, thanks to a new report being debuted by industry sales tracker NPD.
From Gamasutra:
NPD this month will release a new report, “Games Industry: Total Consumer Spend,” which will attempt to give a bigger picture of how much the games industry makes by including such non-retail business models, along with physical retail data.
“Since new physical sales at retail have been down for some months now, the news that the industry is beleaguered has been widely covered, and it has caused unnecessary angst for many,” [NPD analyst Anita] Frazier said.
NPD reported last week that combined digital, used and rental game sales were between $2.6 and $2.9 billion for the first half of the year, in addition to the $3.7 billion spent at physical retail on new games, hardware and accessories for the period.
Did you catch that? The revenue NPD hasn’t been reporting so far is somewhere around three quarters as much as what they have been reporting. Hopefully this new report will also take a more sensible approach to reporting things like individually-packaged guitar controllers and other music-game accessories.
Here’s a neat little addition coming with the upcomign Xbox 360 dashboard update, according to Game Informer:
[Microsoft is] adding the ability to sign-out profiles on other controllers in the sign-in UI within the Guide. This is especially useful when playing games like Rock Band.
This frustrates me all the time when I want to switch from guitar to drums or vice versa; I always manage to forget to sign out until after I’ve already turned off the controller. Certainly not a revolutionary feature, but a welcome one.
Hit the Read link for more details about the update.
[Read]
You longtime readers may have noticed that posting has been at something of a minimum around here lately. There’s a reason for that: I’ve been spending a bit of time working on another project.
Some of you may know that I’m a musician myself. I used to play bass and sing for a punk band here in Cleveland called whatever… (I know, shut up), and after leaving the band I embarked on my own musical odyssey under the name Johnny High Ground.
In the mid-’00s I sort of fell off that wagon, though, due to work schedule and time constraints and not knowing anybody in San Francisco I could play with.
But now, dammit, I’m getting back on.
I’ve redesigned and relaunched johnnyhighground.com, and put a hefty chunk of my older material up for sale on iTunes. With the exception of three tunes recorded with a live band in ’01, these are all songs I’ve written, performed, and recorded entirely by myself.
And that’s just the beginning. First off, those same songs should be up for sale at Amazon any day now. Once that happens, I’ll probably put the rest of my current catalog up for sale as well. And then: new tunes! I’ve got a backlog of songs that I’ve been dying to record for years, and I’m trying to trick myself into getting motivated to put them down for posterity at last.
I’m hoping to get some live performances in, too, one of these days. But it’s been years since I took the stage, so I plan to start small.
The one downside to all this: Thanks to an epic hard-drive disaster in ’05, I no longer have the masters to any of these old songs — which means I can’t get anything up on RBN until I record something new, or re-record the old tunes. (There’s a faint chance my pal John Davison may have some of my masters lying around on an old hard drive, since he was having fun remixing a few of my tunes for awhile, but that’s a very long shot.) But an RBN release is definitely in the cards, sooner or later.
Anyway, I’d love it if you’d head over to johnnyhighground.com and check out the songs. And it would mean a great deal to me if you’d help spread the word about this musical endeavor. The great thing about having sat on these songs for so long is that the tools for spreading the word about new music have gotten much more widespread and powerful since I’ve been away. And you’ll find lots of those tools at the site.
Thanks for indulging me. I look forward to hearing what you think.
