The music business can be a tough industry for the budding artists who are looking for that one big break. Music streaming companies like InMusik and Tidal are doing their best to provide an online platform for undiscovered talent by allowing indie musicians to upload their tracks directly, eliminating their need to find a third party distributor. Maintaining an online presence is one of the most crucial strategies for success in this day and age, but a quick way to introduce a musician’s craft to an enormous, eager market is by producing music for media, namely video games.
Kirk Hamilton, contributor of Kotaku, explains, “Writing and orchestrating music for games has evolved and branched into an accessible, entirely viable way for today’s composers to make a living with music… Smaller indie games provide independent composers a means with which to broadcast their music to a massive and enthusiastic audience.” Partnerships between indie artists and indie developers continue to reinvent the relationship between music and games, which show that there’s much more to video games than what we see in posters and TV commercials.
However, teaming up with an indie game developer is not without its obstacles. For the developer, he has to compete with established franchises and pop culture phenomenons, such as Marvel which has branched out to online casinos, releasing Marvel Roulette on Betfair among other portals. For the composer, he has to find a way to appeal to an audience that finds joy in games with familiar tunes, like Bally Technologies’ Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ slots. But once you find that sweet spot that enhances the gaming experience while promoting your own work and showcase it to the right target market, your could be breaking new grounds in your career as well as in this field.
Spreading music through a video game has been extremely lucrative for artists like Beck, who composed three songs for the PS3 Game Sound Shapes, though some still are not in favor of the idea of licensing their tracks to developers. Yet these days, game creators are going above and beyond the licensing-music-and-walking-away routine. When discussing the partnership with Lights, Tegan and Sara, and Metric in making an indie rock video game, Alex Jansen shares that his team is doing numerous things to capture the individual personality of the groups, due to their desire for a much higher integration of the bands. From the looks of it, a video game could be your ticket to fame.
