Warners: Shutting Doors on Guitar Hero and Rock Band Tracks?

Warner Music Group's CEO, Edgar Bronfman, is not amused with games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. He's so annoyed at the 'paltry' sums paid by companies such as Electronic Arts/MTV and Activision Blizzard to license tracks for their games that he is talking about not licensing any more.

WMG recently declared that its net losses were down from $17 million (£8.5) in the second quarter of last year to $9m (£4.5m) this year. It controls labels and connected artists such as Electra (The Doors, Joni Mitchell), Atlantic Records (Led Zeppelin, Bjork, Rush and Sugar Ray), Bad Boy Records (P. Diddy, Dream), Lava Records (Antigone Rising), Roadrunner Records (Sepultura, Nickelback, Killswitch Engage, Black Label Society), rykodisc (The Misfits), Rhino Records (Black Sabbath, The Monkees, Alice Cooper).

Bronfman told The Washington Post that video game licensing fees are "paltry" and "far below their true value".

He didn't stop there, reminding the games industry that a deal of the content that games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band use (and make popular again) is "entirely dependent on the content we own and control".

This lead the Post to quote him as going as far as to state that, "Unless there is a real partnership among game marketers and artists and labels, WMG will be hesitant about going further to license its music for video games."

Sounds menacing and as business savvy as the chap called Dick Rowe at Decca Records who once turned down a band saying that, "guitar groups are on the way out". That band was, of course, The Beatles.

As yet, we've yet to hear any artist featured on either of the incredibly successful game franchises complaining that the profile given to back catalogue - or in the case of dinosaurs such as Metallica, new album - is making them suffer.

It's not as if any of them are voice actors in GTA IV is it?

^{Sources:
The Washington Post
Reuters}