Industry sales tracker The NPD Group has released their numbers for September game sales, and MTV Games would like you to know that The Beatles: Rock Band outsold Guitar Hero 5 by a fair margin. “We outsold them two-to-one on a revenue basis,” MTV Games general manager Scott Guthrie told Gamasutra, “and we outperformed on a unit basis as well [about 20 percent, says Industry Gamers], despite the fact that they had an eight-day advantage, and were giving away free software.”
A press release from the Rock Band folks says the game “debuted as the top selling music video game in the U.S. for September” and “was also the #2 selling title across all genres by revenue in the U.S for the month of September.” But note a couple key phrases. First: “top selling music video game in the U.S.” — NPD only tracks U.S. sales, so worldwide sales could paint a different picture. And it was the top-selling music game. In terms of sales numbers it was beaten by Halo 3: ODST and Madden 10. It’s also important to note that these numbers are combined across all available platforms.
The second key phrase to pay attention to is “by revenue.” The fact that the game did notably better by revenue than by sales means that people were buying more expensive versions — in other words, bundles. From this we can safely conclude the game brought in a fair number of newcomers to the genre, folks who didn’t already have a suite of plastic instruments lying around. That’s good news for the health of music games across the board.
But not everyone sees these sales as a good thing. USA Today says:
Analysts expected the game to sell at least 1 million copies. Instead of a bona fide hit, “The Beatles performed at a respectable level [of 595,000 copies],” says analyst Jesse Divnich of Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. But with downloadable albums on the way, … “I have no doubts we will see a resurgence in sales during the holiday months.”
So if Beatles Rock Band beat out GH5 with only “respectable” sales, what does that say about Guitar Hero 5′s performance? I fully expect Activision to counter with some worldwide sales numbers in the near future.
Well, this is considerably less than 20 million, but still a very healthy number, nevertheless. “All You Need is Love,” the Beatles Rock Band download released concurrently with the game, has sold over 100,000 downloads, says MTV Games.
Hey, you knew that 
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