Sounds disruptive: How video games are resetting the music medium’s conventions | Playable Futures

This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world.

The snowballing intersection of music and video games has been a near-obsessive talking point across both sectors over recent years. From famed musicians taking starring roles in triple-A titles, to placement on FIFA playlists starting to rival Spotify for gathering new fans, opportunities abound.

At the same time, the music industry is still guided by concepts established decades ago, from the dominant licensing model, to the album and single release framework. The potential for even more happenings around music and games coming together is profound, and yet until recently, the former’s legacy conventions have arguably held things back.

That was something very much on the minds of Alex Tarrand and Oleg Butenko as they began to concoct their concept for Styngr, a gaming-focused blend of music industry joint venture and technology platform. The duo of co-founders saw an opportunity to modernise the ecosystem that connects music and games.

“Music [has] this legal architecture that’s been in place for a long time and it doesn’t really match the speed or requirements of game companies”

“We were looking at how the potential crossover of music and games wasn’t being fully realised, and we saw that this old model of music licensing didn’t really work for most games,” offers Tarrand, Styngr COO. “That’s how it was, and how it still is to a degree. But things are changing, and they have to.

“Video game companies, essentially, are software companies. Software companies want to be able to move fast, socket into APIs, or take a code library like an SDK for advertising or analytics. They keep moving, are used to immediate integrations, needing to move fast and iterate. And then when it comes to music, there’s this legal architecture that’s been in place for a long time – some of it from the Motown era – and it doesn’t really match the speed or requirements of game companies. We wanted to change that.”

By 2020 – the same year that 12 million fans turned up at a Travis Scott show hosted in Fortnite – Tarrand and CEO Butenko had established Styngr, which self-identifies as the gaming tech and development arm of the major and indie music labels.

Styngr ultimately provides game developers and studios with an effective, efficient way to bring both major label and top indie music into games, while presenting artists and labels with increasingly dynamic, even personalised ways to connect with fans. It operates as a joint venture between major rights holders from the world of music, with a focus on passthrough licensing via a bespoke technology platform, over traditional sync and licensing models.

“If you’re a game maker, we probably look like ad tech to you, at least in principle,” Tarrand explains. “But instead of sending you ads, we send you music. On the back end, our guts look very similar to a DSP. You get the same granularity of usage reporting, and marketing reports and also royalty payments and structures that are broken down. And then on top of that, we have a blanket license structure. So if you are a platform – probably an enterprise platform or platform-like game, and you want to cut tonnes of licenses, you can just leverage what we have, keeping it really simple.

“And then with the passthrough licensing model, you can import anything from radio feeds and playlists to tones and snippets into an environment in your game, and offer them as micro transactions, subscriptions, or have brands fund them for uses We’ve built a lot of stuff that’s really, really tailored for games, and really focused on surfacing music in a way that works for games and their players.”

Tarrand is full of enthusiasm and insight when it comes to looking at a future where music enjoys a new freedom in terms of its presentation in games. He sees a world where games’ sonic elements are increasingly personalised, and where music extends the very modern phenomena of people putting as much effort into expressing identity, individuality, and personal brand in games as they do in reality.

For years, music has guided popular culture. Decades worth of young people have built their identity, style, ethos, and presentation around music-led subculture, from punks and mods to ravers and goths. That phenomenon now very much exists in games, albeit without music playing such a present role. A change is coming there, however, and it may completely reinvent the conventions of the music medium.

“Until recently we haven’t seen a lot of sonic equivalent to people using the likes of skins to express their online identity.” Tarrand confirms. “There has always been a lot of great music in games – and games often served as this platform for music discoverability. So games like the original Tony Hawk titles way back, and now we see games like NBA2K doing a phenomenal job of that. But personalisation of connecting players with music will bring so much more.

“What do you want to listen to in a game? What do you want other players to hear around you? We already see audio emotes proving increasingly popular. They sell, and now they are part of this movement of people expressing their identity in games. If suddenly those emotes might be a little snippet of Post Malone saying ‘goodbye, goodbye, goodbye’, or you play a snippet of Lizzo loudly saying ‘It’s thick 30’, that’s the start of a big change for music.”

“Perhaps the ultimate influence of games here is changing how music is seen and interacted with by consumers, and the forms in which it’s delivered”

The Styngr team has recently launched their latest product for Roblox, Boombox. Inspired by nostalgic memories from the 1990s of people sitting on their stoops with a cassette player thumping, drawing in neighbours, expressively sharing their latest music discoveries, Boombox’s powers the same experience in Roblox. Players can carry a digital ghetto blaster with them, unleashing a feed of tunes as they go.

It’s an example of a pivotal shift: where once music was thrust upon players, and limited by games’ once offline nature, today users can choose music, share music, use it for the likes of emotes, and be proactive in the soundscape of the titles they love.

Music as a means to express identity, then, is increasingly moving from the high street to the live video game – and increasingly, games are starting to take a share of music’s status as a cultural speartip.

“Music has always been really good at leading culture, setting style, and almost distilling what’s going on in the world and synthesising it into something that’s accessible, and that you can hear and feel and form a personal connection with,” Tarrand enthuses. “And in games right now we see how into skins people are, and those skins are almost a simulacrum of how we use fashion and style in the real world – or maybe they are a play on that.

“But thinking about how for decades music has led culture, and thinking about music personalisation in games, it’s mainlining what’s happening at a cultural level. And the more people can personalise it, the more social it becomes.”

Players, Tarrand believes, will increasingly contribute more to the in-game music ecosystem, giving more genres a slice of the gaming pie. And increasingly, games are where younger demographics are going for their music. Soon they will be subscribing to in-game radio services, or finding potential for new game-exclusive streaming platforms, or want ultra short form music they can deploy as emotes. Creators in the likes of Minecraft and Roblox increasingly want music to fit around the experiences they build, rather than fit their creations around old conventions of three-minute linear songs.

Tarrand even speculates that where once fans might meet at a concert, form a band and practise in their garage, they could now discover music, connect with one another, for acts, and even produce music in games. For now, we are seeing an emergence of digital-first bands more concerned with their presence in the likes of games, but soon bands may form, exist, and create exclusively inside titles like Roblox.

“I think soon we’ll see Gen Alpha and Gen Z going to games as their first place to find and consume music, and that means interacting with music in new ways,” Tarrand continues. “So perhaps the ultimate influence of games here is changing how music is seen and interacted with by consumers, and the forms in which it’s delivered. The focus isn’t as much about physical concerts and bars and radio plays anymore, and traditional streaming has proven hard. And now in games we’re seeing this shift away from labels and artists focusing only on placement. Now they’re thinking about engagement.”

“I think soon we’ll see Gen Alpha and Gen Z going to games as their first place to find and consume music”

In fact, we are already seeing early signs of artists and labels looking more like game companies, including when they are focusing on Discord for fan engagement, as seen with Coldplay. Increasingly, musicians could be seen to start thinking with an acquisition and retention mindset, starting to provide something like updated, maintained, ‘liveops albums’. Others might start producing micro tracks made for emotes.

Over in stand-up comedy, TikTok’s dominance has seen routines restructured – with something of a focus on less intertwined, elaborately structured gags, so they are more readily plunderable for clips. Video game emotes might soon have a similar impact on the way individual tracks are made.

“We really might soon see the definitions of what music is, and what performance is,” Tarrand concludes. “The motivations of artists, what their aims are, and how they manifest their art and brand might also change. How they present themselves as digital entities over physical ones is really interesting. Then you add the ability through things like AI to completely and constantly rework your visual identity, maybe even personalising your brand and sound for different fans – it’s a really exciting space.”

None of those things are certain, but they are looking increasingly likely. And with games continual rise as a guiding force of popular culture, the chance that music will have to change to share its kingdom with its new bedfellow is increasingly likely.

Playable Futures is a collection of insights, interviews and articles from global games leaders sharing their visions of where the industry will go next. This article series has been brought to you by GamesIndustry.biz, Ukie, and Diva. You can find previous Playable Futures articles and podcasts here.