As a composer, I'm interested in knowing - is anyone is interested in purchasing 'music packs', e.g. 5 music tracks for about £10 / $15? The packs would be written to suit a particular genre, e.g.: Dance / techno music (e.g. for shoot-em-ups / action games) Orchestral (e.g. for RPGs, or dramatic action) Ambient (e.g. puzzle games) Mario-style (e.g. platform / kids games) Rock / Metal The basic idea is, you can use the music in any game or production you have, as often as you like, but the musician holds the rights (basically to sell to other developers).

Well, since this is the musicians thread, I would guess that most of us would probably write it ourselves :)

However, if you mean just in general, the answer is...it depends. You have to be able to market yourself to a wide range of people, and you have to be prolific--the day might come when you have 50 requests and only 10 different music packs--are you willing to distribute your music so widely that the same song is heard in four different games?

I personally would want original music for my game, but I know others have no problem using music from media libraries. So it depends on your marketing base.

I could definitly pay for music composed for my game exclusivly. It could be simple techno loops or whatever, as long as the music fits the game and as long as the music is quality-composed.

Yeah I'm doing stuff exclusively at the moment but it's hard to get contracts. I was just wondering if there's a demand for more sort of cheap (but good quality) plug-n-play packs.

If demand was high obviously I'd re-invest and produce more to give more variety.

Well, for a free game, I'd write the music myself. If I had no musical tallent, I'd get a friend or someone else to do it for free. Only then would I be interested in paying for it (and then, $15 for non-exclusive would be a good guess at how much I'd be willing to pay).

Reason being that - obviously - free game generally has no budget except the creator's time. And, of course, the reason for that is that it's generally a hobby and learning experience.

So yeah - you might get a couple of people who make free games and have no musical tallent (either themselves or via people they know), and have a bit of money to spare, but I don't think it's likely.


So next - looking at a shareware games. If it's just a small cheep game (and the creator has no musical tallent). Then yes, I can see them going for this kind of service if they are aware of it.

Then, there are some of the shareware games available from places like here. These games that are more commercial (almost like boxed games without the box), will probably be after an exclusive sound.



So yeah - as far as I can tell, there wouldn't be a huge ammount of demand for a product like this. I think you'd need to adjust your plan a bit.

Perhaps there is a way of capturing the lower-end of the high-end shareware games. One idea might be to make your music modular - the name of the technique escapes me - it's where the song is divided into sections and different parts plays depending on what is going on in-game. You could do something like this, only in the studio on a per-game basis, and combine it with re-instrumentation, etc.

This will let you give people almost-exclusive music that is developed specificly for their game, which may be all many of the shareware developers need.

Alternitivly (or as well), you could use this same scheme to reduce the cost of producing the music in the first place. After all, the market segment that dosn't really mind having non-exclusive music, isn't going to really care if you have a techno piece and an orchestral piece in your collection that are almost the same but have been re-instrumented and adjusted a little.

Thanks for your comments - I agree with a lot of your comments. Most of the developers I talk to ask for exclusive rather than non-exclusive, but I am trying to pitch my prices at a decent level. Also, non-exclusive doesn't seem to pull in many customers!

Quote: Perhaps there is a way of capturing the lower-end of the high-end shareware games. One idea might be to make your music modular - the name of the technique escapes me - it's where the song is divided into sections and different parts plays depending on what is going on in-game. You could do something like this, only in the studio on a per-game basis, and combine it with re-instrumentation, etc.

This is roughly what I am doing with my present project, but only because the developer wants to layer the music according to the action in the game. I'm not sure it would be easy to sell layers of music like that, because the developer would need guiding on how to get timing and the use of channels right, which would create support issues and potential problems for me.

I think I may build up a set of tracks to sell non-exclusively, possibly via PayPal, then start to add exclusive tracks and push people towards custom-written music.

Quote: Original post by Caff
I'm not sure it would be easy to sell layers of music like that, because the developer would need guiding on how to get timing and the use of channels right, which would create support issues and potential problems for me.

Actually, what I meant was that you could use the same technique off-line/non-live (ie: in your studio, not in-game) to create individualized, exclusive music from a set of your own reusable modules (that you don't release). The end result being either semi-exclusive music, or easy creation of your non-exclusive music.

Ah I see, that's an interesting idea... I'm not sure how well it would work in practice but no harm in trying out I suppose.