The Score is a new, collaborative editorial vertical exploring the intersection of music and video games.

In our Season 2 research on music and the metaverse, we identified gaming as one of the hottest entry points for today’s artists to create and monetize visually immersive, interactive experiences around their music. Yet, the gaming industry also remains as misunderstood as it is overhyped, and carries a much richer diversity in experiences, perspectives, and formats than might make it into the mainstream media.

This column will seek to break down these gaps in understanding for a music-industry audience — highlighting of-the-moment opportunities for artists and their teams to collaborate with gaming companies of all shapes and sizes, across mobile, PC, and console games. Every two weeks, Water & Music member Mat Ombler will break down an underrated music/gaming case study — outlining specific insights around monetization models, marketing strategies, and creative tooling, while contextualizing the case study against higher-level business and technology trends. Our aim is for each issue to leave readers not only more informed, but also inspired to experiment and push the boundaries of what’s possible with music and gaming partnerships.

As a community benefit, we have also set up a brand-new, dedicated forum channel in our members-only Discord server for The Score, where members can discuss our findings and share music and gaming resources in between issues. We encourage you to pop into the forum, say hi, and even make a new post of your own!

Blackpink, PUBG, and the rise of virtual concerts in mobile games

Tl;dr —

• PUBG Mobile — a battle-royale mobile game where players compete to be the last ones standing, held its first in-game concert experience dubbed The Virtual with K-pop group Blackpink.
• PUBG Mobile has 30 million daily active users and is one of the most popular mobile games in the world.
• Players that registered for the Blackpink concert were rewarded with exclusive event-themed items, including character outfits and voice packs of the band members.
• The concert was monetized through in-app purchases of Blackpink cosmetic items, plus a leaderboard where players could pay to cheer on the band and increase their cheer value, which could also be swapped for Blackpink items.
• Blackpink debuted a new track during the performance, “Ready For Love,” which was released as a PUBG Mobile-themed music video shortly afterwards. It’s running close to 80 million views at the time of writing.
• Radio plays for Blackpink in Malaysia and Indonesia — where PUBG Mobile is one of the most popular video games — are up 55% and 23% in the last 28 days (27 July–24 August), according to Soundcharts.

Since forming in 2016, the all-girl K-pop group Blackpink have been making waves around the world. They’ve got nearly 16 million monthly listeners on Spotify; their 2018 track “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” was the fastest K-pop track to reach one billion views on YouTube; their latest single “Pink Venom” recently debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Trending songs chart; and their upcoming world tour, which starts in October 2022 and runs for eight months, is being celebrated as the first time they’ll return to the stage since 2020.

You’d be forgiven, then, for not knowing that Blackpink is already on a different kind of “tour.” Namely, they performed a series of in-game virtual shows at the end of July 2022 — and not in your normal big-name contenders like Fortnite or Roblox. Rather, the shows were part of a collaboration with PUBG Mobile, a battle-royale shooter (the same genre as Fortnite) available exclusively on Android and iOS devices. This also marked PUBG Mobile’s first-ever in-game concert — a significant milestone for the already-popular game, which boasts over 30 million daily active users globally, according to Sensor Tower.

In terms of official industry recognition, the concert has gained some buzz, winning the inaugural MTV Music Video Award for Best Metaverse Performance. But in terms of everyday industry discussion, the event seems to have fallen on deaf ears, for a few potential reasons.

First, even though mobile games contribute more than half of global gaming revenue, mobile games are generally underreported by most media outlets. Second, the popularity of Roblox and Fortnite as metaverse platforms gives off the impression that they’re the only games where in-game concerts are happening. This is categorically false: In the past few years, we’ve seen a fan-made version of SXSW take place in Minecraft, The Offspring play a concert in World of Tanks, and the kings of mosh, Korn, take to the virtual stage in the MMORPG Adventure Quest 3D.

There is a much richer narrative unfolding in the world of music and gaming right now than might meet the mainstream eye. And PUBG Mobile’s collaboration with Blackpink could be a major turning point for virtual concert experiences — with the potential to pull some of the focus away from established games and platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox, and towards other underrated, mobile-first gaming platforms that are growing at a faster rate.

Mobile games: a new market for the global music industry?

To understand why this Blackpink concert in PUBG Mobile is such a big deal, it’s important to cover some points on the makeup of the mobile market as a whole, including platform metrics, monetization methods, accessibility, and gameplay features.

The mobile gaming market is completely different from where it was a few years ago. Advancements in hardware and network infrastructure mean the market has started to move away from the casual time-sinks you might associate with most mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga and Coin Saga. While these titles might have staying power in the charts, they’re the only hyper-casual games to do so in the top ten. Instead, we’ve seen more AAA-quality titles from big-name publishers such as Tencent, Sony, Bandai Namco, and Nintendo climb their way to the top of the pack, namely PUBG Mobile, Genshin Impact, and Garena Free Fire.

As a result of growing player numbers and device accessibility, mobile games now generate more than triple the revenue of PC/Mac and home console games. Figures from Sensor Tower show that PUBG Mobile, published by Tencent Games, has just as many players as Fortnite (30 million daily active users), and was the second-highest grossing mobile game in the world in July 2022.

What makes this even more impressive is that those 30 million players on PUBG Mobile do not include players for region-specific versions of the game in India (Battlegrounds Mobile India) and China (Game for Peace). So, it would be reasonable to assume that the total number of PUBG Mobile players worldwide is closer to the 65 million that was recorded by Tencent in 2021 before the game was banned in India and China.

If you’re wondering why PUBG Mobile is so popular in India, it’s largely down to the accessibility of mobile games. Mobile handsets are much cheaper than gaming consoles, and a lot of people in the country use PUBG Mobile as a gamified social platform thanks to its voice chat features (similar to Fortnite and Roblox). And the popularity of mobile experiences in South Asia makes mobile games the perfect platform for artists that are looking to tap into new markets, which is why I believe we’ll see plenty more concerts similar to the Blackpink experience in PUBG Mobile.

How the Blackpink/PUBG experience was activated and monetized

The Blackpink and PUBG Mobile collaboration, dubbed “The Virtual,” was announced to press on July 12. From July 15 onwards, players could grab their free tickets and a Concert Resource Pack crammed with exclusive items. To help spread the word about the event, Tencent heavily promoted the collaboration within the PUBG Mobile game ahead of the performances, which took place on July 22–23 and 29–30 in North and South America and on July 23–24 and 30–31 for the rest of the world. PUBG Mobile’s social integration also meant that players could tell their friends when they’d grabbed their ticket, through a share button that would post an auto-generated message onto their social media platforms.

Similar to the concert experiences in Roblox, the actual music performances only make up a tiny part of the PUBG Mobile concert experience. In the case of The Virtual, the Blackpink performances lasted for around 10 minutes, although this did include the debut of a brand new track, Ready for Love. An official music video for this track was also released on July 29, stylized with the PUBG branding and the same aesthetic of the in-game experience. It’s clocked up nearly 80 million views on YouTube less than a month after its release.

In addition to the main concert experience, The Virtual also featured a variety of side events and challenges. One event introduced a set of daily missions based around The Virtual which rewarded players with an in-game currency, Pink Crystals, for logging into PUBG Mobile day during the The Virtual, completing one match in PUBG Mobile’s classic mode, and showing support for Blackpink by cheering them. Pink Crystals could be used to purchase character outfits and other cosmetic items.

PUBG Mobile also attempted to break the world record for most concurrent views of an in-game concert, an accolade that’s currently held by Travis Scott for the 12.3m views he pulled in for his Astronomical performance in Fortnite, back in 2020. PUBG Mobile players joining The Virtual experience will have noticed an in-game challenge called ‘The New World Record’ which could only be completed if 12.5m players watched the Blackpink performance at the same time.

While The Virtual ultimately fell short of this ambitious target, we’re yet to see how many people attended anyways, as Tencent hasn’t released official figures around the event yet.

As for the ten-minute concert experience, players could fly around in a virtual environment and be prompted to pull off dance moves, similar to what happens in Roblox and Fortnite. During Blackpink’s performance of “How You Like That,” the in-game environment transformed into a rhythm mini-game where you had to collect hearts as you weave your way around a futuristic fretboard — basically a more kawaii version of Guitar Hero or Sayonara Wild Hearts.

If you’re starting to think all of this branded activity sounds pretty expensive to pull off, it probably was. I can’t imagine getting exclusive rights on debuting a Blackpink track is cheap, but given that PUBG Mobile is owned by Tencent Games — a subsidiary of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group, whose deep fingers stretch into many music-industry pies across streaming services and major labels — it’s not like they couldn’t afford it. There’s also an existing relationship here, too, as PUBG Mobile collaborated with Blackpink in 2020, though it was for in-game menu music and cosmetics rather than a concert.

And like most virtual concerts, the entire Blackpink/PUBG Mobile collaboration was monetized with optional in-app purchases for players who wanted to commemorate their experience, by purchasing exclusive event items such as Blackpink virtual merchandise (i.e. skins and voice packs, which feature voice recordings of Blackpink members that can be assigned to players’ avatars).

Another interesting but rather unusual in-app purchase came in the form of a monetized side event called Cheering, where the biggest Blackpink stans could increase their cheer value gauge to unlock event-exclusive items. (PUBG has a social hang-out area of the game called “Cheer Park” that is active outside of one-off events like Blackpink’s show.) Some of these items could be unlocked for free if players logged in every day to earn their rose for completing the daily login challenge, which can be swapped for a cheer, earning them cheer value. However, the best exclusive items such as two of the outfit packs required a ridiculous amount of cheer to unlock — 50,000 and 200,000, respectively.

Stay with me here, because this is where it all gets a bit weird. To unlock this amount of cheer, you’d need to buy 10 airplanes, which can be swapped for 250,000 cheer. 10 airplanes will set you back 10,000 UG — that’s PUBG Mobile’s in-game currency — which would cost over $99. There was also an in-game leaderboard keeping track of cheer value, so players with the deepest pockets could prove they’re the biggest Blackpink fans by essentially emptying their pockets. (A quick scan of some subreddits reveals several fans who felt confused or even duped by these monetization mechanics.)

Why do mobile games matter for artists and their teams?

In the absence of any official figures from PUBG Mobile, such as virtual merchandise sales or attendance rates, it’s difficult to put a figure on how successful this collaboration was. That said, figures from the mobile game analytics platform GameRefinery show daily revenue jumped from $50,000 when the event was announced on July 13 to a spike of $420,000 on July 28 — but these figures are only for the iOS market and don’t include the region-specific versions of the game, so they’ll likely be much higher.

There’s been a considerable month-over-month increase in Spotify listeners over the last 28 days, according to figures from Soundcharts, especially in India (8.3%), the USA (21.9%), and Indonesia (33.1%). Radio plays in Malaysia and Indonesia, where PUBG Mobile is one of the most popular video games, are up 55% and 23% in the last 28 days, while the group has picked up over 370,000 followers on Twitter and 2.8 million YouTube subscribers in the last 28 days, too.

As I mentioned further up, the less hardware-intensive nature of mobile games means they command larger audiences, and the biggest benefit from tapping into mobile games is being able to reach new audiences beyond your primary target market. That might be one of the reasons why Justin Bieber is hosting a virtual concert in Garena Free Fire next month, another mobile game that’s hugely popular in Southeast Asia but also surpassed 150 million daily active users in Q2 2021 according to Sea Limited’s finance report for the same period.

Sounds like the kind of virtual concert experience you’d like to hear more about, right? We’ll have a deep dive on the Justin Bieber and Garena collaboration in two weeks.

Got a pressing question about music and gaming? Let us hear it

As this is a new column focusing on a topic that some members may not know much about, we’d love to hear any questions that you might have about music in video games — whether you’re lamenting the death of Guitar Hero and Rock Band and wondering where it all went wrong, or are interested in diving into the monetization mechanics driving freemium games today such as Fortnite, Roblox, and PUBG Mobile.

We’ve set up a brand-new, dedicated forum channel for The Score in our members-only Discord server, where members can discuss and share music and gaming resources in between issues. We encourage you to pop into the forum, say hi, and even make a new post of your own!

You can suggest topics for future issues directly in the forum by clicking here. If it gets enough upvotes and our editors find it compelling, we’ll feature it as the main topic in an upcoming issue and credit you for seeding the idea.