Guitar Hero CEO Dan Rosensweig has said that he’s unfazed by the drop off in sales in the music game genre during 2009, claiming that there’s still plenty of opportunity for growth in the category.

Speaking shortly after the NPD Group reported that sales of music games were down 46 per cent in the US during the first eight months of 2009, Rosensweig said that it had been a tough year for the industry as a whole.

“It has been a difficult economic year for everybody. Videogames are down, music videogames in terms of overall are down, but most people don’t understand that the music videogame category is actually the second largest selling gaming category period,” he told CNBC. “So after Call Of Duty… the entire music genre and Guitar Hero franchise will actually be the number two selling game franchise, so that’s a position we actually consider to be enviable.

“We’re focused on providing value to the consumer, so I don’t think [the market for music games] is saturated. If you actually look at the number of consoles that are out there on a global basis, less than 20 per cent actually have a music game. So there’s the next 80 per cent that we have the opportunity to go after. So there are more consoles, those consoles are getting more connected and we have the opportunity to sell more into that audience. So we're not particularly concerned about that."

The executive went on to say that Activision – which recently launched Guitar Hero 5 and will release DJ Hero and the family-focused Band Hero in the next few months – isn’t swamping the market with products.

"It’s not really blanketing the market as much as just acknowledging the size and the opportunity within the music category,” he said.