SingStar: The Music

I think one of the differences in a way, in terms of licensing well-known tracks, preceding games like this generally a license like that was exploitative in that it was seen almost as endorsement. Whereas this is more about people engaging with the music, and I think some bands - that perhaps you wouldn't have expected to start doing SingStar - bands themselves started playing it and thought it was fun. They liked the fact that people engaged with their music so much - it's different to listening to a certain rock track while driving, or something. If you're actually singing the track, as a musician, that's probably your biggest fan endorsement.

It got easier after we'd made the first SingStar as well, because people could see what we were doing. Those artists who were at first very reluctant looked at it and saw that the music was being treated with respect.

Sometimes we'll go for exclusivity, but not that often. Sometimes if we're doing a big artist-specific disc, because it's confusing to consumers if the same content were to appear on a competing platform with different mechanics, and so on.

But actually, for example for the Store, we're not generally looking for exclusivity. You'd always pay more for that, and do you want to pay more to stop those artists being able to sell their music in other places?

Because traditionally we've been a compilation business the chances of somebody copying the same track listings as us is basically nil, just by virtue of how complicated it is.

No, not really. Maybe the odd artist we'd love to have that's already tied up somewhere. In some respects I guess so, but it's not really been haunting us.

It's a catalogue business, as long as you have a good breadth, for the consumer that's far more important that being exclusive. Your exclusivity is having a million tracks, for example. The fact that we've been doing the business for about six or seven years - in the background for the first two - means that we have a good head-start on that, and that's more important for us than having exclusives.

We do publish a lot of content, whether it's on disc or in the Store, and we're paying out money that's moving through the system quite well. There's money that's coming in there that's a substantial part of their targets, so it's very much a relationship that's a two-way street.

They'll pitch to us, as well - they'll come and say they've got a great idea for a song, and more and more we're finding that a certain track might be in line with certain activity. To start with it was more about synchronisation, but now we're looking perhaps slightly longer term at marketing plans. Perhaps a band might be touring, so we'll look at ways to put a track on the Store maybe.