Music Ally

Are console gamers hot for streaming music? The omens are certainly promising from Microsoft’s launch of Last.fm on its Xbox 360 console.

It only went live last week, but already more than one million new users have signed up for Last.fm via the console – apparently the biggest growth spurt for the site since it first launched in 2002. More than 120 million minutes of music have been streamed by Xbox 360 users in the last week too.

Meanwhile, Last.fm has separately announced the launch of its BlackBerry application, adding to its existing apps on other smartphones.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr turned up onstage at Microsoft’s E3 press conference last night to plug the upcoming music game The Beatles: Rock Band – and more details of the game were also announced.

45 songs will be bundled with the game, with others available to download from a dedicated online store. One – All You Need Is Love – will have all royalties from sales donated to the Doctors Without Borders charity. There’s a trailer too – the first sight of how the game will look. Watch it above and let us know what you think.

Harmonix has confirmed that its Beatles-themed music game will be released on 9 September this year, and will be called The Beatles: Rock Band. An official site has gone live today inviting gamers to sign up for alerts when pre-ordering begins.

It’s a big deal – the game will launch simultaneously in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, and will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

The game will include support for guitar, bass, mic and drums, but will also offer “a limited number of new hardware offerings modeled after instruments used by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr throughout their career”.

Sitar! It has to be a sitar…

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Microsoft has announced that it’s currently delivering 3.8 million music downloads a month for console games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, via its Xbox Live store. The company also reckons that so far, it’s delivered 45 million music files for these games, and estimates that this is more than 80% of all downloadable songs for music games.

Microsoft has also revealed that more than two million copies of Rock Band have been sold for Xbox 360 in the US – “almost 1 million more than the competition combined” – while Rock Band 2 has sold 363,000 Xbox 360 copies since its launch on 14 September.

All this is an effort by Microsoft to pitch the 360 console as “the preferred stage” for music games. Okay, so it’s not anywhere near the level of iTunes, but we’d hazard a guess that a decent chunk of those 3.8 million monthly downloads are going to people who don’t normally pay for digital music.