The EA video game Rock Band has just been revealed as having outsold iTunes for the Motley Crue single ‘Saints of Los Angeles’. This represents a massive heads up for the music industry as music fans are getting more and more involved in video games as a medium in which to purchase music.

Motley Crue placed the single, the title track from their latest album ‘Saints of Los Angeles’, on Rock Band for purchase in advance of the actual release of the album. The places the song could be purchased was either Rock Band, or on iTunes and similar music download destinations.

The band’s management, Tenth Street Entertainment, claims that the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band accounted for more than 47,000 downloads of the track within the first week. It should be noted that MTV, the publisher of Rock Band, have yet to verify the figures, and figures for the PS3 version of the game were not made available.

On iTunes and Amazon in the same period the track only managed 10,000 downloads.

The real surprising thing about these figures is that when a customer downloads a track through Rock Band they cannot transfer the music to an MP3 player or iPod, nor can they transfer the music to a PC. It can only be played through the game.

This shows that video games are becoming a viable means of selling music to hardcore fans; something that more and more music companies will be buying into.