Music in video games has come far since the days when Tetris would speed up “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” until you had a seizure. (We still get sweaty palms during the Nutcracker.) Now, video games soundtracks are the new launching pad for artists and composers.
It all started with “Guitar Hero,” itself a surprise hit that has sold over 1 million units since
its launch in November 2005. This exposed the in-game songs–17 of which were by indie bands from Boston–to a huge audience. People liked the new songs and wanted to listen to them–independent of the game. It was all very low budget. In fact, many of the tracks were played by members of the Harmonix development team including “All of This” by Shaimus, which wound up garnering over 150,000 plays on MySpace and 6,000 iTunes downloads.
Games are wasting no time capitalizing on the trend. Already, gamers can purchase bundles of new songs for the Xbox 360 version of “Guitar Hero II.” The PS3 version of “SingStar Pop,” which will launch this fall, has an online library of hundreds of tracks called the SingStore, where users can buy and download music. The platform represents a new opportunity for unsigned bands to get a boost. “Guitar Hero” was launched with a contest called “Be a Guitar Hero,” which invited people to submit songs for inclusion in the game. Expanding on this idea, Harmonix recently announced that they will be taking requests for possible tracks and bands to be included in their new game, “Rock Band,” scheduled for release Holiday 2007. Fans may go to the game’s official site and nominate up to four songs to be in the game.
Music labels aren’t standing back either. Recently George White, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Product Development at Warner Music Group (WMG) said recently:
“We’ve always had a lot of enthusiasm for the category, and are seeing it rightfully getting its due in this market,” he said. “It’s the beginning of this being a channel for the distribution of music and an important one. It’s one of the few place we’ve seen in the sweet spot of what consumers want to do with music today, which is interact with it.”
Gaming company Electronic Arts even created their own music label, Artwerk, to sign, develop, and launch artists from their games. Future artists who join the label will also have their music appear in EA titles, as well as through film and distribution channels. Since 2004, the MTV Video Music Awards has had a category for “Best Video Game Soundtrack.” Past winners include: Tony Hawk’s Underground, Dance Dance Revolution EXTREME and, most recently, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.
Just why is the music industry so jazzed? Well, gaming itself is no longer just for basement-dwellers. Harris Interactive reports that 8 in 10 American Youth play video games at least once a month, with the average 13-18 year old playing 14 hours a week. The worldwide video game market racked up twenty-five and a half billion dollars last year. Projections 
foresee that number growing past 54 billion in the next four years.
Pop music isn’t the only in-game genre getting center stage. In Video Games Live, top orchestras from around the world perform pieces entitled “Liberi Fatali” by Shiro Hamaguchi and “The Dirge of Cerberus” by Hamauzu from Final Fantasy along with scores from Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. among other favorites (including “retro arcade classics” = Pong!). Audience members will even be called up on stage to compete. Roll over Beethoven, this is Classical 2.0.
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1 Videogame music sells! « The ListeNerd // Jun 20, 2007 at 5:12 pm
[…] by Ed X on June 20th, 2007 Next Great Thing says that music in videogames is a hot commodity (as I noted last week!). Game publisher EA has created […]
2 » In-Game Ads: Growing, Growing… » Next Great Thing // Aug 14, 2007 at 10:49 am
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