With royalty rates maybe going up for digital music sales, the music business is in the process of trying wring more money out of growing markets for their products: like MP3 sales and sales via videogames like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. But Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has struck back against the music industry, claiming that the sales thanks to his games are helping the music business out immeasurably.   

“We compensate artists and publishers extremely well,” he said. “There are millions and millions of dollars that are being made and paid. There’s a misunderstanding of the value we bring to the catalog. What happens to your catalog in digital downloads? What happens to your merchandise? What happens to your ticket sales? When you look at the impact it can have on an Aerosmith, Van Halen or Metallica, it’s really significant, so much so that you sort of question whether or not, in the case of those kinds of products, you should be paying any money at all and whether it should be the reverse.”

Whoa, claiming that the labels should pay you to have its music on your games? Ballsy. Kotick backed it up by saying that most buyers of the game have no preference for what music is on the game, they just want to play it, so the labels should pay to have their music in front of the players. But that really speaks more to the fact that the games have nothing to do with music, more with the experience of playing the game.

But either way, Kotick has a point—the labels can’t get greedy when these games are exposing their catalogs to a wider base than before. [Paid Content]