Are music games like DJ Hero playing fair?
Updated on 30 October 2009
Ben King finds out if computer games like the new DJ Hero are fair to the recording artists whose songs are up for being mangled in your living room.
Today sees the release of DJ Hero, the latest in a series of musical video games which have changed the way people play games.
They are also changing way people sell music. But are musicians getting a fair deal from the games companies?
The makers of DJ Hero are hoping it will catch the imagination like other musical video games.
Plastic guitars, drums and microphones, like the recently released Beatles Rockband, have been one of the industry's big success stories of recent years. But analysts fear that the market for these expensive peripherals is nearing saturation, and the DJ version is a bid to turn the tables.
Sales through computer games are increasingly important for artists like the human beatbox DJ Shlomo.
But even when they are central to the game, musicians do not make much money from this industry. A song sold on a CD compilation might earn ten times the amount of that used on a game.
