Rock on...

So here's an interesting question posited by David Edery in Steven Dubner's Freakonomics blog: Can guitar hero help save the music industry?

Some interesting 'statistics' from the article:

Weezer’s “My Name is Jonas,” a song originally released in 1994, saw a tenfold increase in sales when included in Guitar Hero 3.
Songs from The Who’s greatest hits released for Rock Band, experienced a 159 percent increase in SoundScan sales.
A special guitar hero featuring Aerosmith’s music resulted in more revenue for the band than any individual Aerosmith album.

So if this is valuable 'free advertising' for the record industry, why would they still charge the software companies money to include their licensed songs?

Tech firms cut jobs

Three large tech firms in Santa Clara, CA, have announced significant job cuts this past week (see here). The most recent is Sun Microsystems, announcing that between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs will be shed. Sun's CEO, Johnathon Schwartz was quoted here as saying “The focus here is to eliminate some of the inefficiencies that have made it hard to do business with Sun,”and the (short-term) result should be a significant cut to expenditures.

Tough times for retailers

Today Best Buy announced an earnings warning, that is they projected that their earnings will be lower for the year, see the story "Worst. Buy. Ever."

The earnings warning is linked by management to changes in consumer sentiment, as fewer consumers appear willing to spend big recently.

In related news, the rival electronics retailer, Circuit City, had previously announced that it was entering into a Chapter 11 reorganization. This is likely to predict the end of the company, based on the statement of Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter, who was quoted (in this article) as saying: "We have not seen a consumer electronic retailer successfully reorganize in Chapter 11 in our 24 years in this space."