On last week’s This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte and co said of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero,

These games are saving the music industry!

For sure, these kinds of games are introducing classic tunes from years gone by to an audience traditionally interested only in new music (aka “kids“), but are they actually affecting sales?

There’s no doubt that physical album sales are falling thanks to music piracy, but a not-so-emerging-anymore area is digital sales. From data obtained from MarketWatch, you can see some interesting facts and figures about digital music sales in 2007:

• Digital music sales account for 15% of the world’s music market, a 5% increase from 2006
• In 2007, there were 1.7 billion (with a b) single track downloads worldwide

It will be interesting to see how the role of digital music changes over the next few years. At the moment, it seems that digital music sales are acting as a kind of buffer to help falling profits on physical albums. This may change in years to come, and digital music may become the standard even more so than it is now. With the advent of products like the iPhone and Microsoft’s new Surface, digital music may become more and more physical, breaching the gap between a heap of 0’s and 1’s and an actual disc with a case you put on a shelf. It’s too early in the game to see whether or not this is the case, though.

So digital music is kind of a big deal. But how does this relate to hitting plastic coloured buttons on a fake guitar?

Well, it may come as no surprise, but the same people that know how to play Dragonforce’s “Through The Fire And Flames” also know how to download songs. Of course they do – the ability to download new content is one of the ways games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band stay funky-fresh (another way is to play it on a highway). And the numbers say that people like the way this downloading idea works. If reports are to be believed, then these video games are doing their bit for digital music sales.

Now we have a kind of chain – video games help digital music sales, and digital music sales help keep overall music sales up. Is it fair to say that Rock Band is saving the music industry? Will digital music become the new standard, thus reducing CDs to the status we currently reserve for tapes and vinyl? The truth is, only time will tell. I know better than to predict the weather. I do know one thing though – I’m not throwing away my copy of This Year’s Model any time soon.