I just read a very interesting article in the New York Times about the upcoming game The Beatles: Rock Band, and there are a few excepts in there that outline the advantages of having your music featured in a rhythm game.

The story is a whopping 9 pages long, so let me share with you a few of the more memorable sections:

On how rhythm games allow people to connect with your music in a new way:

Two years later, Harmonix, now owned by MTV, introduced Rock Band. Together, Guitar Hero and Rock Band (now rival franchises owned by competing companies) have altered the way fans relate to music.

Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition. “When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it,” Rigopulos went on to say. Paul McCartney said much the same thing when I spoke with him in June. “That’s what you want,” he told me. “You want people to get engaged.” McCartney sees the game as “a natural, modern extension” of what the Beatles did in the ’60s, only now people can feel as if “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”

While all of this may sound tedious or pointless, the games can perform an incredible alchemy. Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. “You feel like you’re creating music,” she marveled. “It must engage some creative part of your brain.” McCartney also quickly understood the game’s appeal. “Miming was always fun,” he told me. “When I was growing up, there was always, on TV, people who mimed to records. It was a thing people did. I always admired the way they had to learn every little nuance.”

On extra album and iTunes sales:

Early on, artists noticed that people were discovering music in games and then buying it elsewhere. On iTunes, downloads of the 1978 Cheap Trick song “Surrender” tripled after it appeared in Guitar Hero 2, and sales of a 1994 Weezer song from Guitar Hero 3 increased tenfold. Increasingly, games are also seen as a significant distribution platform in their own right. In its first week, Motley Crue’s 2008 single “Saints of Los Angeles” sold nearly five times as many copies on Rock Band as it did on iTunes, and at twice the price. Next month, Pearl Jam plans to release its new album simultaneously on CD and in Rock Band.In perhaps the surest sign that the music industry has started to take games seriously, feuds have erupted over which parties are stealing the others’ profits.

On choosing what songs to put in the game:

Sitting in front of his Mac in March, Martin explained that when choosing the 45 songs that come with the game, priority was given to the ones that would be most fun to play, rather than to the band’s most iconic numbers. He clicked the mouse and played a snatch of “Paperback Writer.” In the game, “Paperback Writer” comes toward the end of the live era — in a sequence inspired by, but not an exact simulation of, the Beatles’ concerts at Budokan. The 1966 Japan shows were recorded, but there was no thought of using the live versions in the game. Martin dragged in another file and clicked play. Compared with the familiar, crisp recording on the single,“Paperback Writer” at Budokan is a mess — faster but less energetic, as if the Beatles were just trying to get the song over with. The harmonies are off, and the drumming is sloppy. The screaming audience doesn’t help.

On playing rhythm games vs. playing real instruments:

There is something about music video games that infuriates people. The hostility comes largely from musicians, although many people who enjoy these games are musicians themselves. Even people who are not offended by the games are frequently baffled by them. Olivia Harrison admits that her husband’s response to Rock Band probably would have been, “Why don’t they play real guitars?”

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels. The disparagement of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, then, suggests that music games do resemble actual performance, at least enough so that people feel the need to point out that they are not. Indeed a common defense of Rock Band is that it does teach musical fundamentals or at least inspires people to upgrade to proper instruments. MTV Games’ Paul DeGooyer likens Rock Band to the Kodaly method of music instruction, which assigned hand symbols to do-re-mi and involves using rhythmic tapping as pedagogical building blocks.

Kiri Miller, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Brown University who studies video-game music, says the two most common responses to the game are equally misguided. “Either these games are supposed to be teaching you some fabulous skill that we can celebrate or they are supposed to be having some terrible deleterious effect and turning you into some kind of automaton,” she told me. Instead of thinking of the games in relation, good or bad, to traditional performance, she finds them “compelling in and of themselves as a new form of musical experience.”