The Score: Is Lil Nas X's League of Legends collaboration his smartest play yet?

By: Mat Ombler

Published: 2022-09-27

The Score is a 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 seeks 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!

Is Lil Nas X’s League of Legends collaboration his smartest play yet?

Tl;dr —

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated that Lil Nas X will perform “Star Walkin'” during the League of Legends World Championship finals on September 29, 2022. The correct date is November 5, 2022; the article has been edited accordingly for accuracy.

Riot Games, the studio behind the widely known and loved multiplayer-online-battle-arena game League of Legends (LoL), continues to position itself beyond esports in the hopes of evolving into a colossal entertainment brand.

From virtual bands featuring in-game characters (like K/DA and Pentakill) to collaborations with artists including Imagine Dragons (2014), Zedd (2016), and PVRIS (2021) for previous LoL World Championship anthems, Riot Games has a long history of using music as a marketing vehicle to push its core gaming IP. As we’ve covered recently at Water & Music, 2022 has proven to be a particularly fast-paced year for Riot’s music strategy, with the company recruiting veteran music executive Maria Egan as Global Head of Music & Events and hiring for several other music-related roles across its esports properties, including a dedicated product manager for K/DA.

Riot’s latest splash in the music industry will also turn heads: A collaboration with pop celebrity Lil Nas X on the 2022 LoL World Championship (Worlds) Tournament anthem, “Star Walkin.’” The track debuted online on September 23, and the star will perform the song on November 5 during the opening ceremony for the Worlds finals at the Chase Center in San Francisco.

Through a music-industry lens, this raises a few questions. Does Lil Nas X — one of the world’s biggest artists today — really need this partnership from a marketing perspective? Riot Games has also partnered recently with several emerging and independent artists on their recent music collaborations, positioning the LoL/Riot platform as a meaningful marketing launchpad for these artists’ budding careers. So why make such a dramatic jump back to the upper echelons of mainstream celebrities?

To understand the mutually beneficial elements of this performance for both Lil Nas X and Riot Games, we’ll contextualize crucial elements of Riot’s expansion strategy by outlining the rise of LoL and the use of the game’s IP over time. We’ll introduce you to the multiplayer-online-battle-arena (hereafter “MOBA”) subgenre, illustrate the scope of LoL’s audience and player base, and discuss how Lil Nas X’s Worlds performance and its predecessors seem to have been so easy for Riot to pull off over the years.

Context: LoL’s place in the growing esports market

MOBA games are a subgenre spun out of mods for real-time-strategy (RTS) games, like Warcraft III. In typical MOBAs, two teams try to defeat one another with armies of units on a massive battlefield. League of Legends tweaks this formula, assigning units to five playable characters known as champions, each imbued with unique skills and abilities. In short, unlike traditional MOBA games with armies controlled by individual players, LoL requires five players on each side to control the army.

Currently, there are over 160 champions in LoL. Given the differences among their skills and abilities, you can imagine how competitive matches can get, and how advanced the tactics can look for teams to achieve victory. This high-stakes gameplay where the tables can turn at any second makes it the perfect game to play and watch at esports tournaments. Over 150 million registered LoL players and more than 120 registered esports teams compete at the highest level in LoL tournaments. Further, as new champions enter the game, teams reshuffle their preferred champions to find advantages and refine playstyles, lending to rising and falling fandoms centered around both players for their preferred champions and the champions themselves.

Since LoL first launched in 2009, the universe around the game has expanded dramatically into a total of six main video games, accounting for a total of 180 million monthly active users:

While the LoL brand continues to expand into new cultural and commercial territory, the main reason it can attract big names regarding global partnerships lies in its core roots in the esports scene.

Zooming out, the global esports market was valued at $1.08 billion in 2021. While the road to its classification as an actual sport has been long, recognition from major sporting events such as the 2022 Commonwealth Games is helping esports achieve wider recognition beyond specialist esports and gaming communities, while also making such events more appealing to non-gamers.

During the COVID pandemic, streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube gained a sizable boost in popularity as viewing habits changed. Esports matches and tournaments in particular can easily pick up millions of viewers through livestreams. Newzoo estimates that the total global esports audience sits at around 470 million people; the 2021 League of Legends Worlds Final alone reached 79.3 million viewers.

Figures like these are certainly enticing from a marketing and advertising perspective, and the opportunities for brands to explore commercial opportunities in gaming remain vast — from banner ads, giveaways, and competitions, to direct sponsorship of esports teams and tournaments through branded merchandise. At large, Newzoo estimates that sponsorship contributed $641 million to esports’ global market value in 2021.

Charting Riot’s musical and cultural expansion

As LoL has become more popular, Riot Games has used the IP to branch out beyond just video games into other creative mediums.

There’s Arcane, the animated Netflix TV series based on League of Legends lore. There’s only one season of the show at the time of writing — but it’s already the winner of three Emmy Awards with a 100% critic rating and a 96% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and reached a top 10 TV position in Netflix’s charts in 89 different countries. It also spent six weeks in the global top 10 TV charts and features a soundtrack with original music from artists including Imagine Dragon, PVRIS, and… Sting.

Riot Games goes particularly big for LoL music collaborations. It’s been that way since 2014, when Imagine Dragons wrote the first anthem for the LoL Worlds tournament. Now it’s hard to imagine a LoL Worlds tournament without a new anthem and opening ceremony; it would be like the Super Bowl without an iconic halftime performance. To give you an idea of the production value you can expect from these opening ceremonies, the 2017 Worlds final in Beijing opened with about 200 musicians on stage and a CGI dragon flying through the arena.

Here’s a complete list of all the Worlds anthems and the artists involved with them since then, ranging from pop stars and rappers to punk rockers and heavy metal vocalists.

Toa Dunn, head of Riot Games Music, recently tweeted that Riot is a music company that just so happens to make video games, and that’s quickly becoming true. In June 2021, Riot Games Music collaborated with 20 artists to release a 37-track album of streamer-friendly tracks targeted at content creators amidst the growing threat of DMCA strikes from copyright holders on streaming platforms.

The depth of musical influence in the LoL universe is further expanded by K/DA, Pentakill and True Damage — three virtual bands created by Riot Games with champions from the LoL universe. K/DA has nearly three million monthly listeners on Spotify, their single “Pop/Stars” is certified platinum in the US, and skins of the four main characters in their band outfits can be purchased for $10 each in LoL. Meanwhile, Pentakill keeps the metal masses happy and True Damage caters to the hip-hop heads. Riot Games has essentially transformed in-game characters into credible pop stars, with near-infinite (okay, 160 if we’re going by the number of LoL champions) possibilities for Riot when it comes to experimenting with new music genres.

The history of partnerships between record labels and esports developers and teams also spans several years. Regional divisions of major labels often set up deals with tournaments and teams in specific countries: Warner Music Central Europe has been the official music partner of the Legends European Championship since 2019, providing songs of the week in streamed broadcasts, while Universal Music Denmark launched a music initiative with the esports team Astralis in 2021, launching a team song written and performed by Danish artist Mattis. Warner Music Asia is the exclusive music partner for the Esports Players League (ESL), an online esports platform. Their music is embedded in streams and played during highlights and in-between matches.

For further reading on commercial deals in music and esports, you can read Cherie Hu’s comprehensive timeline of music & esports partnerships from 2018, which tells you everything you need to know about the business context of esports from a music perspective.

What Lil Nas X stands to gain from collaborating with Riot

So, what’s in it for Lil Nas X other than having his music heard by millions of LoL fans?

First, he’s immersing his brand deeper in the esports and gaming community and tapping into opportunities across the industry. Given how much Lil Nas X is pushing this collaboration with LoL on his socials and how much he genuinely seems to be enjoying the whole experience, we wouldn’t be surprised if this collaboration with Riot Games is the first of many. In fact, the artist already has strong links to the gaming community thanks to his concert in Roblox in December 2021. The show was attended 33 million times and is still providing commercial benefits in the form of virtual merchandise sales, which had nearly reached eight figures according to Roblox’s head of music in 2021.

Second, Lil Nas X has precedent to follow. Imagine Dragons’ aforementioned “Warriors,” for example, was used as the official theme song for other competitive sports aside from LoL, including the FIFA 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada, and as the theme song for the WWE 2015 Survivor Series. Imagine Dragons was also able to capitalize on their link to the gaming community by pursuing adjacent business opportunities such as investment in ReKT Global, an esports organization recently acquired by Infinite Reality for $470 million. Alongside continued collaborations with Riot, there’s no doubt that the band’s popularity amongst gamers makes them an appealing licensing offer for video game soundtracks, sponsorship, and advertising deals with gaming companies. (Case in point: Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds is even developing his own video game.)

Finally, Riot Games made $1.75 billion in revenue from LoL in 2020, and as a free-to-play game, LoL relies on in-game purchases of cosmetic items such as skins and animations to make  money. What’s interesting about the skin that Lil Nas X has designed for the game is it isn’t available to purchase directly (skins usually cost between $10–$20). Instead, players need to play games during the Worlds tournament to earn 2,000 Worlds 2022 tokens (a limited-time in-game currency) to unlock it. That said, we wouldn’t rule out  Lil Nas X-themed items in the LoL universe in the future.

As for the single itself, the credits for these Worlds anthems are usually as extensive as any significant pop banger, with songwriting, production, mixing, and mastering led by Riot’s in-house music team alongside record producers — and, in some cases, members of the collaborator’s own team. In this case, it appears Lil Nas X’s team brokered a deal to retain complete ownership of the track, as no Riot Games staff is credited. This is unusual, as Zedd is the only other Worlds collaborator who’s written a Worlds track this way, and even then, Riot supported the track with orchestrations.

Ironically, one catch to the success of this partnership might be the music itself. “Star Walkin’” is already being compared unfavorably by some LoL fans to other anthems in YouTube comments due to how different it sounds. The most-liked comment on the video from a popular LoL content creator reads:

“[The] Song itself sounds good, but it feels like it lacks something powerful, like the previous ones. With more hype/bang I think it would be more fitting for Worlds, considering it’s the only really significant tournament each year.”

We can only speculate how Lil Nas X will capitalize on his gaming creds. Still, suppose his collaboration plays out anything like Worlds’ previous anthem writers, he will inevitably become a vital part of the LoL and esports community and reap the commercial and creative benefits of doing so.

Community discussions

As a reminder, we’ve set up a dedicated forum channel for The Score in our Discord server, where members can discuss and share music and gaming resources in between issues. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed so far — we’ve been super impressed by our community’s enthusiasm and range of knowledge on this topic!

We encourage you to pop into the forum, say hi, and even make a new post of your own. As a reminder, 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.

Here’s our round-up of the latest music & gaming stories being discussed in the Score.