15 ways to incorporate gaming into your music strategy

2020 has been a watershed year for music and gaming partnerships. A small, non-exhaustive handful of examples:

• Travis Scott’s strategic creative partnership with PlayStation and groundbreaking show in Fortnite
• Fortnite’s expansion into non-combat Party Royale mode, featuring exclusive premieres and performances from the likes of Omar Apollo, Anderson .Paak and BTS
• Ava Max and Lil Nas X hosting events for fans in Roblox
• Countless promoters hosting festivals in Minecraft
• League of Legends expanding its investment in its virtual K-pop group K/DA
• Swae Lee investing in the esports culture company XSET
• Sony Music hiring game designers for a new immersive media department
• 300 Entertainment hosting a Twitch stream to raise funds for the first HBCU eSports league
• Logic signing an exclusive deal with Twitch
• Major rights holders signing (some) deals with Facebook Gaming and Twitch

The motivations behind this new wave of collaborations run in both directions. Major game developers like Epic Games and Riot Games — as well as game-adjacent social platforms like Twitch and Discord — are looking to expand into more full-fledged pop-culture brands, and in the process are looking to outside entertainment partners to build up trust and cultural capital among their user bases. Meanwhile, as the pandemic has ravaged the live-events industry, artists and music companies are looking to diversify their digital revenue, tap into the power of highly engaged online communities and experiment with more interactive and immersive technologies.

As the end of the year approaches, now is a good time to zoom out and try to make sense of all this heightened activity. What shapes exactly are music and gaming partnerships taking on today, and where are some of the biggest opportunities for experimentation and growth going into 2021?

In the following pages, you’ll see the framework I’ve created for myself to understand the wide variety of roles that gaming can play in the music industry today. After several years of tracking and research, I’ve tallied up at least 15 different kinds of music and gaming partnerships, each of which falls into one or more of the following umbrella categories:

• Gaming as a business model
• Gaming as a talent and audience opportunity
• Gaming as a creative tool
• Gaming as a branding and narrative architecture

I think what is most exciting to me about this framework, and about the music/gaming landscape in general, is that these partnerships are no longer limited just to soundtracks, sync licenses or even in-game “concerts.” They also encompass digital goods, talent collaborations and wholly new paradigms for creativity, marketing and audience development that allow artists to tap deeper into themselves, their personalities and their storytelling.

Let’s dive in.

Gaming as a business model

When people in the music industry think of partnerships with the gaming industry, the first thing that comes to mind is usually the commercial impact of games.

Due to fundamentally different approaches to monetization and product development, the music and gaming industries have had polar opposite experiences with digitization in the 21st century. While gaming revenue has been growing consistently year-over-year for at least the past decade, annual recorded music revenue has been increasing only since 2015, before which it was struggling with a years-long decline in the wake of piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing. In 2019, the global gaming industry generated nearly $150 billion in revenue — more than three times that of the recorded- and live-music sectors combined ($20.2 billion + $27.9 billion = $48.1 billion), according to figures from Newzoo, PwC and the IFPI.

Today, the majority of articles being written about the gaming industry paint a picture of thriving in the midst of a pandemic, as people spend more time at home and are seeking more immersive and escapist forms of entertainment. Unfortunately, it could not be more opposite for the music industry, especially in the realm of live events. All of the pre-existing reasons I mentioned above for why music companies want to invest more in gaming — diversified revenue, engaged audiences and more interactive and immersive fan experiences — have been drastically amplified thanks to COVID-19.

When I think of “gaming as a business model,” I think of ways that artists and music companies can make direct revenue from video games and their surrounding content ecosystems. A lot of the tactics discussed later in this piece are certainly related to an artist’s business model (e.g. performances at esports championships, investments in esports leagues, game releases alongside album releases) — but the first four tactics listed here arguably have the most commercial potential.

1. Direct content licenses with game developers

This is the perhaps the most “traditional” model, as music is baked into the history of video games. The first bespoke original soundtracks (OSTs) came out alongside the birth of the mainstream video game industry in the 1970s, spearheaded by developers like Atari, Taito and Sega.

Today, aside from developers commissioning composers to write OSTs on an in-house or freelance basis, an increasingly popular approach involves licensing already-existing content from record labels. Games that adopt this practice range from those that actually center music in their core gameplay (e.g. Just Dance, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Beat Saber), to action and sports franchises like FIFA, NBA 3K, Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Grand Theft Auto.

In all of these instances, music and video games are treated as symbiotic promotional vehicles for each other, driving visual music discovery in the same way that old-school broadcast media channels like MTV used to do with music videos.

2. Blanket licenses with user-generated content (UGC) platforms

This approach is more unique to the 2010s and 2020s. Unlike direct deals with game developers, these kinds of blanket licenses can help power the lucrative secondary media ecosystem around games, allowing everyday players and professional content creators to include music legally in the gameplay videos that they upload or livestream on the Internet.

In terms of deal flow (or lack thereof), the most prominent platforms in this regard include Facebook Gaming, which announced licensing deals with major labels and publishers in September 2020, and Twitch, which is still in licensing talks with major rights holders and is currently facing thousands of DMCA takedowns every week from the RIAA.

So many of the cultural and commercial opportunities in music and gaming partnerships will not be able to realize their full potential without a more streamlined, flexible music licensing framework for UGC platforms. Such a framework would help facilitate freer creative collaborations among musicians, gamers and other influencers, and essentially lead to free marketing by enabling players and fans to spread the word about their favorite partnerships without fear of getting penalized.

3. Exclusive partnership deals with UGC platforms

This is a separate tactic from blanket licensing deals because they are normally done directly with individual artists, rather than with labels and rights holders as a whole. Major examples in this group include Twitch’s seven-figure deal with Logic and Caffeine’s exclusive deals with Offset and Drake.

From the artist’s perspective, the key motivations behind doing an exclusive partnership with these kinds of UGC platforms include not just the significant upfront check, but also the opportunity to expand their reach to more engaged and diversified audiences, and to have the creative freedom to produce other kinds of media aside from just music.

4. Live, in-game events

This tactic involves staging live, synchronous performance or viewing experiences directly within game environments. As I wrote last year, the concept of in-game concerts is at least 15 years old, with open-world games like Second Life paving the way for virtual, largely self-organized music events. Today, in-game concerts take two primary forms: Official, exclusive partnerships with game developers and platforms (e.g. Travis Scott and Fortnite, Lil Nas X and Roblox), and unofficial, more DIY events that are unendorsed by the developers (e.g. Open Pit’s Minecraft festivals, or the multiple online versions of Burning Man). For more official partnerships, artists can receive a big payday upfront, in addition to a percentage of sales on branded in-game merchandise (more on that in the next section).

Increasingly, in-game events are no longer limited just to traditional “concerts,” but can also encompass more casual listening parties, fan meet-and-greets and album or video premieres. Epic Games is one of the few developers that has publicly extended the success of its early in-game concerts into a regular schedule of musical premieres, through Fortnite’s combat-free Party Royale mode; Roblox seems to be following suit, judging from its recent partnerships with Ava Max and Lil Nas X.

While these kinds of partnerships gain a ton of buzz in the press, it’s important to reiterate that they are far from the “status quo” in the industry, largely due to the prohibitive costs of producing large-scale, 3D-animated events. As researchers have argued in the past, music rights holders and game developers alike need to resolve several issues not just around scaling production, but also around licensing, metadata and recommendation before a proper, year-round “industry” and economy around in-game concerts can be established.

5. In-game digital goods and microtransactions

Free-to-play games like Fortnite and League of Legends make the majority of their revenue — equating to a collective billions of dollars a year — from digital goods, cosmetics and other “microtransactions” or downloadable content (DLC). Paralleling the physical merchandise that drives revenue and fan engagement at real-world concerts, a natural extension of in-game events includes in-game digital cosmetics like skins, weapons, avatars and even dance moves. Fans can now buy Travis Scott- or BTS-branded skins and emotes in Fortnite, or K/DA and True Damage-branded skins in League.

Microtransactions can also apply to music content in addition to general artist branding. Some developers allow you to purchase exclusive “music packs” in-game — almost like iTunes or Bandcamp, but with a richer contextual narrative layer on top of it in the form of the gameplay. An oft-cited example is electronic producer TheFatRat’s music pack in DOTA 2, which sold tens of thousands of copies in-game within a few days, as I reported back in 2018. Beat Saber andAmanotes are taking a similar approach, inking one-off partnerships with rights holders to make certain songs available for purchase and/or download in their respective games.

Once concerts come back in the real world, there could be a really interesting opportunity to build a hybrid online/offline partnership strategy with gaming companies. For instance, buying real-world merchandise could give you free access to its virtual counterpart in a game, or attending a concert in person could give you exclusive access to a more immersive version of the performance in a game.

6. Performances and syncs at competitive esports events

This tactic may not be as relevant in the middle of a pandemic, but was one of the top gaming opportunities that major labels capitalized on in 2018 and 2019. According to research firm Newzoo, esports events alone drew in $56.3 million and $54.7 million in ticket sales in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Warner Music Group was the official partner for the 2019 League of Legends European Championship, playing WMG-signed tracks during breaks in between games. Similarly, Universal Music Publishing Group China partnered with Riot Games in July 2020 on an esports-focused songwriting camp, which brought together 14 UMPG-signed artists to write songs for this year’s League of Legends World Championship. While Sony Music is investing in gaming in a variety of ways (as we’ll discuss later in this document), they have yet to flesh out a similarly large-scale esports partnership strategy.

Gaming as a talent and audience opportunity

Hard revenue aside, many music/gaming partnerships are driven more by marketing incentives — namely, the opportunity to reach new audiences and to cross-pollinate opportunities with the next generation of gaming influencers. Of course, many business model opportunities are also inherently marketing opportunities (e.g. sync licenses helping to promote songs to new audiences in games), but the tactics in this category focus more on audience development than on revenue per se.

You won’t find a digital community much larger and more engaged than gamers. According to Newzoo, there are around 2.7 billion gamers around the world (across mobile, PC and console), and esports audiences in particular will reach nearly 500 million viewers by the end of 2020, an 11.7% increase year-over-year. Continents like Asia and Latin America are not only increasingly coveted markets in the music industry’s international expansion, but are also the primary geographic drivers of international esports growth.

7. Collaborations with gaming influencers and streamers

One of the simplest yet most impactful ways for artists and gamers to cross-pollinate audiences is simply to appear in each other’s content. The seed for this model was planted in 2018, when Drake joined Ninja’s stream on Fortnite and attracted over 600,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, breaking a viewership record that has yet to be surpassed on the platform.

Since then many other examples have emerged, especially during the pandemic. 300 Entertainment recently co-sponsored HBCU Battlegrounds, an online livestream and virtual career fair that at one point featured rappers like Tee Grizzley, Lil Keed and T-Shyne playing Call of Duty against team captains from esports leagues at HBCUs like Clark Atlanta University, Howard University and Tennessee State University. Red Light Management is facilitating partnerships between its artist roster and the online gaming community via its new dedicated vertical Hit Command. The indie electronic label Monstercat partners regularly with Twitch creators through its claim-free music subscription service, Monstercat Gold (and just launched its Twitch Affiliate fast track program).

8. Investments in esports leagues and brands

Many major artists and music executives are investing in esports leagues and brands like XSET (Swae Lee), 100 Thieves (Drake, Scooter Braun), ReKTGlobal (Imagine Dragons, Steve Aoki) and FaZe Clan (Offset, Jimmy Iovine).

In all these cases, the investors see a major potential upside in funding esports talent in the same way that labels or managers might see an opportunity in signing the next generation of musicians. That said, this kind of partnership does not often lead to direct collaborations between artists and esports leagues in a creative capacity; rather, the nature of the partnership tends to be more strategic and financial.

9. Label imprints and management arms focused on gaming and esports

Gaming influencers and musicians are trying to build brands and audiences on many of the same platforms today, whether on Twitch or on TikTok and Facebook. So it makes sense that at some point, the music companies that are the closest to musical artists (i.e. labels and artist management companies) would want to expand and translate their capabilities to other kinds of creators, including in gaming.

Seeds for this kind of partnership were planted at latest back in 2018, when the major gaming streamer Ninja partnered with Astralwerks to release the electronic compilation album Ninjawerks. Since then, some major labels have expanded into entire label imprints that focus just on musicians who like gaming (or on gamers who are good at music), such as Universal Music’s Enter Records and Sony Music’s Lost Rings. In the other direction, League of Legends is also working with real-world artists to voice the members of virtual music groups, like the aforementioned K/DA and hip-hop-focused True Damage, whose music is distributed internally through a division called Riot Music Group.

Gaming as a creative tool

For reasons illustrated above, there seems to be a lot of preoccupation in the music industry with the financial and commercial impact of gaming. But an equally if not more exciting opportunity lies in how gaming can lead to whole new ways of thinking about creativity and narrative storytelling around a given song or album, not just about bottom-line revenue.

A good place to start when thinking about this conceptually is that both music and gaming share a vocabulary of “play.” But “playing” music on Spotify manifests itself quite differently from “playing” a game. The latter is less static and more interactive, and gives the fan more immediate agency in shaping the outcome of their playing experience.

The tactics in this category involve artists applying a game-inspired interpretation of “play” to how fans listen to and interact with music. In all of these cases, the fan has to “play” a game or navigate a game-like environment — whether using a console, mobile app or VR/MR headset — to make the music come to life, and has more control over how the end product sounds than if they were just listening to a static track on a streaming service.

As I wrote in a recent DJ Mag column, this brings to light the concept of the “player as performer,” and shifts music from static, finished product to dynamic, immersive audiovisual system through which fans can move around, explore and chart their own paths. The artist is a designer and curator, merely controlling the set of possibilities of what those paths look like.

This also has a major implication for how we understand music itself once it’s delivered through a game or game-like engine that can be constantly updated, just like software. Instead of presenting an album, say, as a long-form, static manifesto, it turns into something more like software — perpetual works-in-progress that are unfixed and come with frequent updates. As I wrote for Complex in February 2020, this approach was arguably pioneered in a streaming context by Kanye West and his album The Life of Pablo, and could easily apply to a gaming-centric music strategy as well:

One could make the argument that this software-driven approach to album releases is ultimately better for the music industry as a whole. After all, major labels are throwing millions of dollars a year into marketing budgets for a wide range of albums, with success far from guaranteed. Embracing a software mindset would allow labels and artists to mitigate some of that risk by not spending all the marketing dollars around a single release, but rather by spreading out marketing over multiple release “versions,” gathering valuable fan feedback along the way … In this scenario, the creative process becomes the product more than its output, and the state of being unfinished creates more demand than the finish line itself.

10. Hardware: Creation using game consoles

There’s a decades-old tradition of musicians repurposing game consoles and machines as electronic instruments and synthesizers in their own right, from the Game Boy music sequencer Little Sound Dj to the sound chip of the Commodore 64 computer. The simple, “8-bit” musical sounds from these old computers have lived on in recent decades, particularly in the genre of “chiptune” music, which has spurred its own festival franchises and inspired songs from the likes of 100 gecs and Anamanaguchi.

The much-hyped launch of Sony’s PlayStation 5 this month also has an unexpected angle related to music creation: The console includes patented technology that can incorporate players’ actions and emotions as inputs for procedurally generated soundtracks in games. For instance, if a player is spending more time in an intense battle sequence, the A.I. can automatically increase the tempo or density of the background music. (The original patent, “Dynamic Music Creation in Gaming,” was filed in May 2020.)

11. Software: Creation using interactive mobile apps

This tactic involves using mobile apps as a core, interactive delivery channel for new music itself. One of the most influential examples of this approach is the accompanying series of mobile apps for Björk’s 2011 album Biophilia, which encompassed a constellation of experiences that required fans to interact with their screens in a game-like way in order to activate specific verses or stems of songs from the album (see the apps for “Virus” and “Crystalline” for key examples).

In his paper “App Music,” researcher Jeremy Wade Morris claims that these kinds of albums packaged as mobile apps help make the underlying music “modular and iteratively commodi­fiable,” as the app environment represents a “reiterating drive to overcome the limitations of the music commodity by infusing it with additional informational content.” In other words, the apps treat music more like software. But that’s also precisely the reason why the “album app” movement died out after around 2016, as most artists and labels did not have the patience or financial capacity to  continually update their apps over time, leading to a subpar fan experience.

12. Hardware/Software: Creation using mixed-reality tools

This tactic involves using virtual, augmented or mixed reality engines to create interactive experiences around music that inherently involve more physical, bodily movement.

One of the best-known examples, which has yet to be followed up on in a meaningful way, is Tónandi, a partnership between Sigur Rós and the mixed-reality hardware company Magic Leap in 2018. The experience maps sea-like objects and plants onto your surrounding environment, with which you can make adaptive and generative music by reaching out and interacting with your hands. The stems used as source material for the app were a mix of original and pre-existing music from the artist.

The challenges around business model and distribution for VR and MR put an inherent ceiling on the impact of music- and gaming-specific applications of these technologies. That said, AR is much more accessible — to anyone who owns a device with a camera — and labels are already investing in AR and 3D design technology for their artists. For instance, Warner Music Group recently invested in the pre-seed round for 3D developer platform Anything World, which has developed a technology that allows you to design 3D assets with your voice.

Gaming as a branding and narrative architecture

Aside from being involved in the creative process itself, another as-yet underutilized application of gaming is as an architecture for telling the narratives around a given piece of music.

Many of the most iconic and memorable games involve interactive storytelling with narratives that emerge through action and exploration. In particular, media scholar Henry Jenkins has pointed out four primary kinds of narratives that exist in games today:

• Embedded — textual or visual clues and cues as to what actions should be performed
• Emergent — narratives that are not prestructured or preprogrammed, and that take shape through more improvised gameplay
• Enacted — players must perform actions to reach certain predefined goals (either overarching or localized)
• Evoked — through the above techniques, evoking a world that feels familiar

This framework can be helpful in the context of more immersive world-building and storytelling around a given album release, particularly if it’s a concept album or involves fictional characters or personas that warrant more fleshed-out development beyond the confines of just a handful of songs. Especially as audio streaming services limit the amount of context artists can share about their work, games and game-like environments can become powerful vehicles for bringing that narrative context to life.

13. Album release campaigns with games

The strategy of releasing a thematic game alongside an album release has been around almost as long as the video game industry itself. For instance, the 1982 Atari game Journey Escape, which was released one year after Journey’s album of the same name, illustrated a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of “escape” — instructing players to help all the band’s members get past the grasp of overeager fans, paparazzi and promoters.

The tradition has carried on in the 2010s and now in the 2020s, with recent examples including Katy Perry’s web game Smile (to go along with her eponymous album), Glass Animals’ mobile and desktop game s2e3 (named after “Season 2 Episode 3,” a track off their album How To Be A Human Being) and Yaeji’s web-based Woofa Joofa Juice Club, which allowed fans to request and listen to an exclusive unreleased track from an in-game fictional DJ.

14. Album release campaigns as games

This tactic involves using game environments or game-adjacent social tools as the main channels for an album release strategy. Nine Inch Nails pioneered this approach in 2007 and 2008, when they planned an 18-month alternate reality game (ARG) around their dystopian concept album Year Zero. The band dropped mysterious physical merchandise, USB drives, posters and even burner phones at their tour stops and other fan events, all of which contained secret messages or links to websites that offered deeper context into the narrative behind the album.

Year Zero presented a new take on liner notes that incorporated multiple  social and community outlets where fans were already active into a kind of hybrid physical/digital scavenger hunt. As Trent Reznor put it in a 2007 interview with WIRED: “I started thinking about how to make the world’s most elaborate album cover, using the media of today.” More recently in 2020, PC Music’s A.G. Cook drew from this mindset when he created a dedicated Discord server for fans called the Apple Guild, which ran from August to September and unveiled many of the core themes in the producer’s latest album Apple through a mix of interactive text and video chats, including an integration with Twitch.

I think one can experiment with this kind of mystery-driven storytelling without doing a full-fledged ARG. For instance, the indie web game Family, which was released on Itch.io this past summer, walks players through a mystery involving fictional bands from London’s pop scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s. To win the game, players have to correctly identify the names of the bands’ members by triangulating musical recordings, audio interviews, written memoirs, liner notes and other forms of evidence. I can see this game format helping to generate buzz and drive a lot of deeper fan engagement and exploration of either upcoming albums or back catalog from real-world labels with cultural impact, like Motown, Dreamville or Roc Nation.

15. Parasocial artist-branded games

This tactic encompasses artists featuring in games that promote their brand and lifestyle as a whole, rather than any specific album or catalog.

Key examples of these games include Wiz Khalifa’s Weed Farm, a mobile weed empire simulation game with over 10 million downloads to date, and BTS World, which simulates the experience of managing and developing BTS in the group’s early stages. Outside of dedicated games, there’s also the growing trend of artists partnering with avatar companies to create lookalike, animated versions of themselves that can live in games and other online environments (e.g. see recent announcements around Gismart and the Genies SDK).

A major connection among all of these projects is the parasocial relationships they encourage between artists and fans. “Parasocial” interactions involve a one-sided feeling of closeness; in these cases, the fan feels like they are assisting the growth of their favorite artist or chatting with them in real time, when in reality they never get to know the celebrity personally — and the celebrity probably doesn’t even know they exist. As Jay Castello wrote for The Verge: “Literally turning [BTS] into game characters further blurs this line between person and persona, in a way that is intended to bring fans even closer to their idols — all in the hopes they’ll shell out more cash.”

Conclusion: Concerns about the future of music and gaming

In the concluding section of this document, I want to lay out some potential pitfalls and concerns to keep in mind as the music and gaming industries continue to converge and partner in new, holistic ways.

Community authenticity. Gaming communities have one of the sharpest and most aggressive bullshit detectors on the Internet, and will know when they’re being pandered to.

I think Sony Music’s Lost Rings imprint, while admirable in its focus on women gamers of color, is an example of where trying to over-cater to the gaming community falls short. Every single track on the label’s latest compilation album — Lost Rings Presents: Player Select — has fewer than 1,000 streams, which is arguably a failure for a major-label release. If you listen to each track on the album, the lyrics rely heavily on gaming terminology (including loaded and arguably sexist terms like “waifu”) in an attempt to connect with gamer audiences, at the expense on focusing on the quality of the songs as a whole.

In reality, most gamers don’t want to listen to music that’s only about gaming. They just want to listen to… good music. This is where a company like Riot Games is ironically doing a better job than a major label at creating high-quality, gaming-oriented music in a way that is mindful of what gamers actually want (e.g. if you look at the lyrics for K/DA or True Damage songs, almost none of them have anything to do with gaming itself).

Diversity and inclusion. The gaming industry has a long way to go in regards to diversity and inclusion on all fronts, especially with gender and race. According to Newzoo, 46% of game enthusiasts in 2020 are female — but the gaming industry certainly doesn’t reflect that yet, and nearly all of the music partnerships announced with major game developers this year feature established, male artists.

Then there’s the racial angle — which falls short on multiple fronts in the gaming industry, from lack of diversity in software developer and industry leadership roles to majority-white (and majority-male) game characters. These also happen to be similar to the issues that the music industry is facing around gender and racial representation, and it could be really powerful if music and gaming partnerships could involve the collaborative mission of making each other more diverse, instead of merely perpetuating inequities that already exist in their separate worlds.

Over-commercialism and the ethics of “gamification.” As I’ve written in the past, an overemphasis on game mechanics to engage fans (often called “gamification” in the business world) has the potential danger of making people too attached to the surface-level game, rather than to the core idea or goal being “gamified” in the first place. For instance, in the context of music fandom, this dilemma could take the form of fans feeling more attached to playing a given game than to the real artist behind it.

Gamified metrics and economics at large also introduce an extrinsic motivating factor that could potentially tarnish the “organic,” “pure” nature of much music fandom. In general, the wider gaming industry has faced several controversies and accusations in recent years around overcharging users and prioritizing commercialism over the player experience (e.g. through loot boxes). Hence music companies that enter this landscape should strike an important balance between recognizing the real market value of their work and keeping engagement opportunities fair, affordable and accessible to fans.

2021 and beyond will present an amazing opportunity for music and gaming partnerships — not just for recognizing new sources of value in music and culture, but also for encouraging new forms of creative experimentation. By this time next year, there may likely be 15 more partnership tactics for the music and gaming industries to add to this list, as their mutual understanding and interest continue to grow. With an open mind, the world of possibility is endless.