McNugget-eating pioneers play games instead of music

If you can find a record shop these days (and it is difficult), you’ll notice that it looks very different. Whereas before the alphabetical CD racks would take up most of the space, now the poor CD is shunted off to a corner, like a curious relic of some less advanced time. More and more, record shops are giving over space to merchandise that actually sells: video games, MP3 players, tatty merchandise.

It has always suited a section of the music industry to blame falling CD sales on illegal downloading. But dig into the figures and you’ll find that a lot of the traditional CD spend has now migrated to video games. Once the preserve of teenage boys and the terminally geeky who delighted in shooting, maiming, killing and worse, games have matured to the point that this year they are responsible for more sales than CDs.

In a tightened marketplace, any number of crappy gimmicks are now being used by bands to up their profile and shift a few units. Giving away your album free with a newspaper is now seen as old hat.

You know that music's links with the gaming industry has reached a vital point when The Beatles get in on the act. Apple is notoriously wary of allowing the Fab Four's music to be used on anything, but it has sanctioned the September release of The Beatles: Rock Bandvideo game. The game allows fans to pick up the guitar, bass, drums or microphone and play or sing along with the band's catalogue.

And with bands now writing songs exclusively for video games instead of their new albums (as in Guitar Hero), you get some sense of how much a lifeline the gaming industry is throwing music.

Alt.rock band Fall Out Boy have just scored a massive success with their online game Fall Out Boy Trail, which attracted 250,000 users in its first 72 hours of release. It's not a conventional video game – you can't buy it in the shops; instead, it's free of charge on a website (www.friendsor enemies.com). Put out as "a bit of fun" by the band, it doubles as a handy marketing tool for their music. It uses all the moves and vernacular of a video game, and as such attracts gamers who would not normally listen to their music.

The game is based on an educational video game called The Oregon Trail, which in turn was inspired by America's overland routes for early pioneers.

In Fall Out Boy’s game, a player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding his party of settlers through hostile territory. The game has been updated so that your “rations” are now McNuggets and the hazards to be negotiated include sexually transmitted diseases.

One of the draws of the Fall Out Boy game is that the best players get a chance to win tickets to the band's upcoming tour. While users are playing the game, songs from the band's new album, Folie a Deuxare streamed, and prominent links allow you to buy it from iTunes.

The fact that a quarter of a million of people (hardly all of them fans of the band) played the game in its first three days suggests that the band/gaming interface is a potentially explosive new growth area for the promotion and distribution of music.

But the new gaming ploy is really working for Far Out Boy. The comments speak for themselves: "This is awesome and cool"; "I was rushing to finish my homework so I could play this"; "I played the original Oregon Trailall the time growing up but this is way cooler"; "I'm not a fan of Fall Out Boy but I shamelessly played this."

For Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz the best thing about the game is “that there’s no real reason to it, but it’s a way for people to engage with the band”.

The band make no money from the game. “We have Vitamin Water in there but we don’t even have a Vitamin Water sponsorship deal,” Wentz says. “The reason we put Chicken McNuggets in there is that my entire life people are going ‘you shouldn’t eat McNuggets, that kind of food will kill you’. Here’s my chance for McNuggets to not kill me. In the game they keep me alive.”