I wasn't sure where to post this and felt the Lounge might be a good place to start and look for advice. I am not a developer but rather work in the music industry. I've been looking into ways that music can learn from and get more involved in the video game industry. I recently had some artists I work with included in a Groupees bundle which was an interesting experience. It got me thinking about how else music can benefit from (and possible in turn benefit) gaming. For example I am encouraging more musicians to get onto Twitch after Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit got some buzz when he randomly jumped on and streamed him playing Call of Duty.

What brought me to Game Dev was an idea a developer came to me with when I was working with a death metal band several years ago. He wanted to skin a FPS game he was making for the band and make that a distinct game mod. The project never happened but the idea stuck with me. I thought that a game like a FPS or a team game like a MOBA that was somehow tied to a band where they could promote it to their fans would create an immediate, built in audience plus create promotions like tournaments and such (a band playing with their fans or even fans of Band A vs fans of Band B, etc.).

I know nothing about game design so don't know the kinds of logistics this might entail. I don't have a business plan or even a solid idea, just the general sense that music is shrinking and video games are growing so if my industry is to survive I might as well learn more about yours. I deal with several indepdent artists but if there is something here, I can develop it into an idea to pitch to larger companies and labels.

I would very much like to hear thoughts and feedback from the people here. If there is a more appropriate forum for this I'd be happy to go there. Thanks.

Ed

Chaos Music

This doesn't really address the idea of confluences of the two media, and I'm neither a businessman nor an expert in music, and so feel that my thoughts here should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, three thoughts do occur to me:

First, embrace digital distribution, don't fight it. (Perhaps the music industry is already going this way--as I said, I'm no expert in the field, so I may have missed more movement in this direction.)

Second, drop DRM; it's counterproductive, I believe. (In short, it doesn't really stop pirates, but does inconvenience potential legitimate customers.)

Finally--and this is something that is to some degree an issue in gaming, too, I fear--I'd like to see an end to regional locking/pricing on digital goods: it makes no real sense, save to aid local physical retailers or to make a little extra money. For example, I recall that as of a few years ago, at least (this may have changed in the interim), I as a South African could not buy MP3 music from certain online music stores, Amazon included. There are some online distributors that will sell to South Africans, but all too often they seem to have a relatively limited selection.

(Honestly, I'd like to see the internet declared its own "region" for the purposes of regional distribution (for all digital goods, not just music and games), regardless of the locations of vendor, server or customer; this would allow the extant "region"-based system to continue, while disentangling online purchases from a mesh of distribution rights that I imagine wasn't constructed with so non-geographical a system in mind.)

My thoughts on the matter:

Crossmedia Stuff is all the rage at the moment. Still no project to date seemed to really set the world on fire. Most crossmedia projects involving games where TV Series <-> Game Series crossovers.

There are some real problems that might hamper crossmedia projects having the imagined effect on sales in both medias:

1) different medias might have different audiences. Just because someone is a total Zombie Game fan doesn't mean he is also into watching a Zombie TV Series weekly. And the other way around. In this case all the crossmedia effect is gone.

Same could be said about bands and games. There MIGHT have been a larger proportion of gamers being metalheads in the past. Nowadays I guess that the gamers musical taste is pretty much as diverse as the one of the rest of the world. So you might have reached a larger amount of metal dudes that wouldn't have played the game else. The same cannot be said about gamers not into metal. They might still play your game, but they will dead certain not buy the record if they are not into metal to begin with.

You might get some metalheads interested into that obscure metal band nobody heard about, true. But is that worth the amount of money needed for game development? Which brings us to the next point...

2) Game development costs A LOT. Of course, developing a tetris clone for iOS is quite cheap, especially if you don't worry about the bugs. But if you are talking about 3D FPS and MOBA games with decent to good graphical quality, you are getting into the 1M$+ range quickly. Good things can be done for less, but then there are compromises involved.

And as you want to use this game also for advertising purposes, I would guess you want to reach as many gamers as possible. Which means mainstream not Indie. Which means AAA budgets and big(ger) studios.

Your best bet is to see if you could reach a mutual agreement with a studio developing a titel anyway, early in development, to see if they are interested in using such a "Band Skin" for their upcoming game. If the Band is famous, they might go for it, as it might also help sales of their game. Then you MIGHT not need to pay for it.

A mod can also give you the "Band skin" for less. Problem is, someone still needs to do the art. And that is one of the more expensive parts of game development (apart from marketing which is eating up more than half the total cost AFAIK).

3) You really need to make sure you get someone designing the game that knows what he is doing. There are enough cheesy movie adaptions out there, or other games with famous brands that where cheaply produced before. A lot of them plainly sucked, leading to gamers generally not buying movie adaptions anymore, until somebody told them this specific adaption really did not suck.

You need to make sure the genre and the whole expierience matches the bands image, else it will look cheap and dislocated. For death metal bands that use gory imagery on their covers and violent language in their songs a shooter or moba might fit quite well, and with some slapstick humour you might win one or two points with your audience (Death metal rockers slaying zombies with their "axes", anyone? With an electrifying special move? )

A cutie girl group in a violent shooter though... no. Just no.

That all said, there have been GOOD examples since like... forever.

Rock'N'Roll Racing - Inspired kids from my generation to get old 70's Hard rock and early 80's Metal CDs from the library and listen to Steppenwolf and the likes. This game now REALLY matched an EXTREMLY good sound quality for the time (only 4 Hard Rock tracks, but I be damned if this wasn't the best sound you ever heard from the Super Nintendo, EVER) to visuals which where quite good at the time, and really heavy metal in style. Add to that an actually quite fun action racer, and you had a game that not only sold old Hard Rock songs to a younger generation, but was also one of the best action racers on the console.

Brütal Legend - Marrying the humour of Jack Black, his knack for Rock and Metal, and a as far as I heard quite entertaining game. Haven't played it yet, certainly will at some point. AFAIK Jack Black and the ingenious way how the main protagonist was created in his image, together with the way the whole game made fun of the sometimes quite OTT ridicolous Heavy Metal imagery, sold the game.

I am sure I could find more if I went looking, these were just examples I remember. Maybe not the kind of crossmedia creations you had in mind, but good examples on how to do it, the right way.

What about generally finding a way to make it easy and affordable for developers to license a bands music? Or some way to make it known that a band is open to such things?

1. Involving music industry in game development/distribution
2. ...a game like a FPS or a team game like a MOBA that was somehow tied to a band where they could promote it to their fans would create an immediate, built in audience plus create promotions ...
3. I know nothing about game design so don't know the kinds of logistics this might entail.

1. You're not talking about an industry-wide involvement. Or if you are, there's no way to make such a thing happen.
2. Plenty of bands have been involved in providing music for games, and had their names featured on the box or in ads or reviews. I don't see a new idea here.
3. This isn't about game design. It's about marketing and cross-promotion, which is why I moved this to the Business forum.

What about generally finding a way to make it easy and affordable for developers to license a bands music? Or some way to make it known that a band is open to such things?

I am a big proponent of bands using the Creative Commons License for projects that aren't going to be initially for sale. For paid projects a good source of music would be sites like Sonicbids or ReverbNation. They allow you to create an Opportunity for free and artists can submit their music directly to you for consideration.

In general most indie artists are more then happy to have their music used in a game just for the exposure.

I am a big proponent of bands using the Creative Commons License for projects that aren't going to be initially for sale. For paid projects a good source of music would be sites like Sonicbids or ReverbNation. They allow you to create an Opportunity for free and artists can submit their music directly to you for consideration.

In general most indie artists are more then happy to have their music used in a game just for the exposure.

What about setting up some kind of a "Musician looking for ingame gig" and "Game dev looking for music" forum / exchange website, where people interested in featuring a bands music in their game, or musicians interested in having their music featured, could find each other and get to terms?

I guess for both Indie musicians and game devs this could be beneficial, and as long as they can come to terms on grounds of payments (free, royalities, paid in advance), or art style (style of music / style of game), I could see a lot of happy game devs on this new website.

The biggest hurdle to me is that the Game dev world and the world of musicians are sometimes way apart, and devs and musicians often are more or less opposite in their character, at least the stereotype dev and musician.

Creating a page that makes it easy for both sides to browse a directory of game projects in need of music and ready to feature a band, and musician profiles (And maybe even song-excerpts) of musicians ready to let game devs use their music, would help a lot. Especially if you could create search criterias like "music for free", "music for a horror game", "music with bongo drums", or respective categories when searching for game projects.

They still need to talk to each other in the end, but by then it is already clear that their needs fit together 99%. And hopefully the game devs already go to listen to the music and liked it, and the musicians already have a good idea about the game project and are thrilled by it.

The only thing left is that your website now somehow translates between the two worlds a little bit. Sound-Pro language sounds a little bit gibberish to me as a software dev at times, I guess it is the other way around for the sound geeks. But if you make sure that everyone logs in as a Role ("Musician" vs. "Game Developer"), you can then adapt the language in the tools to what they understand, or give selected help topics depending on the role.