As both industries were undergoing rapid growth, the arrangements around licensing music for video games were a work in progress. He first started working with record labels at EA for the release of Road Rash in 1995, which featured music by the popular rock act Soundgarden. Randy Eckhardt, founder of Eckhardt Consulting, has a career spanning 25 years in the games industry. It's an old problem."Īlan Wake is a high profile example of a game being removed from sale over music licensing issues How has video game music licensing changed? This mistake usually only has to happen once and they learn the hard way. "The most fundamental mistake we see is when developers miss that first step of separate clearances for the song and the recording. Usually the developer wants to pay a flat fee for the sound recording and for the sync rights to the song. Game developers who are not at a major game publisher probably can't go down this route. "Most game companies employ music supervisors to handle their licensing," says Austin-based music lawyer Christian Castle, owner of Christian Castle Attorneys, a law firm specialising in music rights. If you want to feature licensed music in your video game, one of the easiest ways to protect yourself (and your game) is by working with music supervisors, who specialise in navigating the minefield. That's a lot to take in, and most game developers aren't experts when it comes to the legalities around music licensing. On top of all that, copyrights might be owned by different people or companies in different countries, and rules vary around the world."
This is important because, on the song's side, copying and communicating are often licensed separately. "Third, if you sync a track into a game and then make that game available via an online network, in copyright terms you are both 'copying' and 'communicating' the music. If you want to use a co-owned song you need to get permission separately from each co-owner, any one of which can say no. "Second, copyrights can be co-owned and song copyrights routinely are.
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So if you are using recordings of songs, you'll need to license two sets of rights - the song rights and the recording rights.
"First, the copyright in songs and the copyright in recordings are separate. "Licensing music for games can be a complicated business for three reasons," says Chris Cooke of CMU, who writes, talks, teaches and consults about the music industry. "Now that people are doing remasters and more and more games are starting to get re-released, we're starting to see issues" What makes music licensing so complicated? Such issues have affected games such as Obsidian Entertainment's Alpha Protocol and Remedy's Alan Wake, both of which were removed from sale, although Alan Wake appeared back online after its music licenses were renegotiated. These deals can be very complicated due to a variety of reasons, from the length of the licensing agreement to future releases of video games affecting the original contract. When developers want to feature music by bands and artists in their game, a licensing deal needs to be made. It's a healthy relationship, but like all relationships it isn't without problems - and many of the problems associated with music licenses can cause some games to be removed from sale. Today, the relationship between the two industries is mutually beneficial: developers can license popular music to make their games appeal to certain audiences, while musicians benefit from instantaneous exposure to millions of new listeners (and usually a lot of money).
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When CD quality audio became a reality, games like Road Rash, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, FIFA and Wip3out demonstrated that video games could be a new format to market music and drive sales. Midway's 1983 arcade game Journey featured 8-bit arrangements of the titular band's music, and the 1988 hip-hop track Megablast by Bomb the Bass was the title music for Xenon 2 Megablast on the Amiga.Īs video game hardware evolved throughout the 80s and 90s, the technical limitations that had previously limited the use of music in games started to disappear, and the music industry saw a new opportunity. Video games have been using licensed music in their soundtracks since the 80s.
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