The Royalty-Free Music Gold Rush
Pop a squat on Daddy’s knee, champ. You won't get a takedown strike for this one.
Today’s newsletter is about how music use has evolved in the content creation world, and how the entertainment industry, creators, and game developers have responded to increased DMCA takedowns.
The past twelve months have been a rude awakening for many creators in regards to the music they play while livestreaming. Up until last year, creators operated in a nebulous space, often playing tunes from their favorite artists, regardless of whether they had the rights to use it or not. When inconsistent waves of DMCA takedowns against creators on Twitch began in 2020, a majority of the platform retreated and looked to services to fill the deafening silence. In response, a bevy of independent artists and some record labels have publicly stated that their music can be used either on-stream, in VoD content or both. The big hitters like SME, UMG, etc. still hold out, though.
Regardless of your stance on the matter, the conversation around music rights and streaming has created an environment of fear. A fear that even a few seconds of copyrighted music may seep through. That fear is justified, too: three strikes and you’re out. A channel, its content, and key revenue driver, gone. Why would you want to risk your livelihood just to watch a video game trailer that features a snippet of a licensed track?
We’ve seen this revelation rear its ugly head at a number of key moments. BlizzConline’s infamous Metallica concert where TwitchGaming’s own livestream had to overlay royalty-free tracks in order to avoid a DMCA strike. Geoff Keighley, at the Summer Games Fest, explicitly called out the fact that streamers didn’t need to mute Wheezer as they contractually ensured that their song was whitelisted. Square Enix had two separate livestreams: one for private consumption, and one for co-streaming. It was a stark juxtaposition, particularly when you’re selling a product (Guardians of the Galaxy) whose mainstream identity is tied so deeply with iconic 80s music and that USP (Unique Selling Point) is stripped wholesale from it. Thoughts and prayers to the production team who had to build out double the assets just to make this work.
Hell, we had this happen with the Battlefield 2042 reveal trailer. For better or worse, music is somewhat of a critical component of a Battlefield reveal trailer, thanks to our Battlefield 1 reveal back in 2016. Although we were legally gucci on the streaming side, we still had instances of creators concerned that 2WEI’s heavy remix of Kickstart My Heart wasn’t enough to hide from the DMCA search systems. Watching NickMercs quickly mute the reveal trailer to his 10s of thousands of viewers as vehicles crash over ice in Antarctica is a jarring reminder of just how seriously creators take this.
“We ain’t going out like this to a Battlefield trailer, boys!” - Nickmercs, 2021
Now let’s consider in-game music and the implications around that. Certain video games and music tracks are synonymous as we often think about them nostalgically:
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City | Billy Jean - Michael Jackson
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 | Guerrilla Radio - Rage Against the Machine
Need for Speed Underground | Get Low - Lil John & The East Side Boyz
Saints Row: The Third | POWER - Kanye West
Counter-Strike 1.5 community servers | Clubbed to Death - Rob D
Red Dead Redemption | Far Away - José Gabriel González
Battlefield Vietnam | Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival
More game developers are finding ways to protect creators, through features like streamer modes, however their implementation is primarily to remove anything that could be struck by a 3rd party.
Granted, creators make up a fraction of an overall player base, but the removal of a carefully curated list of music is effectively the removal of an important and atmospheric part of your product...but what are the other options?
Developers can either:
License the music.
Score an entirely new soundtrack.
Replace it with alternately-approved music.
The former is exorbitantly expensive with more legal work, and the ROI is very questionable. The latter two are the more likely outcome but still present their own development hurdles.
Folks like Harris Heller have done great work to capitalize on the market opportunity, introducing StreamBeats as a royalty-free alternative for creators to use in any content creation. For a niche-focused category, Harris has been able to accrue 180,000 monthly listeners, and his most-played tracks range from 1.8 - 2.2 million plays. That’s not necessarily the point here; the objective is breadth rather than depth. Since 2020, Harris has released 25 albums. Each one has around 25-30 tracks, running around 2 minutes a piece.
For the short time that I streamed on Twitch in 2020, I used StreamBeats. For my Spotify Wrapped, none of my top played songs were from Harris, but he featured in my top five artists due to the sheer volume of tracks that I listened to. How did this happen? When you want your version of royalty-free lo-fi chill hop beats to create to™️, you’re not chasing a select few bangers. What you want is an album or playlist that you can hit play and let run on repeat without fear of repercussion. Search “StreamBeats - Lo-Fi” and there it is. Not-so-coincidentally, Harris’s top two played tracks, White Lie and Ambient Gold, are also the top tracks on that playlist. It’s an added bonus if a streamer just drops their music channel when playing a game and keeps Spotify running, meaning that the play count keeps racking up even when no one’s actually listening.
Harris methodically nailed this format: Make great-sounding creator-friendly music across multiple genres and reinforce your StreamBeats branding in everything that you do. His success has led to an expansion into multiple channels dedicated to new types of music offerings, and...a 100 Thieves collab??
Let’s go back to that 180,000 monthly listener number and run it up against the active content creators and their audiences. Independent artists still have a large market opportunity to push to more creators, but also importantly, more general listeners. With more people working from home and in a more personal environment, autonomy of music listening choice has increased and people are chasing instrumental mixes to keep their brains busy while plugging away at whatever task they’re doing (Me: I’m listening to KEY - I Wanna Be, which may as well be instrumental since I can’t speak Korean 😂). While StreamBeats has gathered a dedicated core audience, there remains a large swath of not-yet-reached creators and consumers.
Enter League of Legends:
On July 2, 2021, Riot Games announced Riot Games Sessions, a collection of music developed in partnership with independent musicians for use by creators without fear of copyright strikes. While adhering to Riot’s Legal Jibber Jabber and Guidelines, creators are free to use the music however they see fit. When I saw the announcement, I immediately DM’d industry colleague, Ali, to congratulate and praise the move. Here’s why I’m excited:
Value to Creators and Players:
By this point, I hope that I’ve established the notion that there is a growing audience of people that are hungry for the royalty-free music alternatives, or just some easy-listening beats. Riot’s release and distribution of the Riot Games Sessions is a direct investment in their value proposition to creators and players. This is yet another signal that Riot believes in the long-term place that creators have within the marketing mix, and that whatever tools they can provide is another offering to ease the content creation process, enabling creators to focus on making the best content about Riot games. It lowers the entry barrier by providing a critical component of content for free. It secondarily reinforces the idea that Riot is a transmedia entertainment company, with IP that carries far beyond gaming. It’s providing active and passive enjoyment that keeps the brand floating in the back of everyone’s minds.
Investment in and Exposure to Music Artists and Producers:
We all know that Riot’s player base spans hundreds of millions of users. Combined with their social media accounts plus the creators who make content about their games, the reach potential of the brand is incredible. A partnership with Riot is an incredible opportunity to unlock a new audience of listeners, and develop a larger community of followers. I don’t know if there are rev-share agreements in place for streaming/ad-rev, however these artists/producers have the opportunity to earn ongoing residual revenue from this partnership to help support future projects.
Expanding the Ecosystem
I’m a big believer in identifying players’ ritualistic behavior and injecting your brand into as many functions of that as possible. Music consumption is universal behavior, and Riot is now in an even better position to leverage Sessions to maintain a steady presence in one of the most popular apps on the App Store. League of Legends already has 5.6 million monthly listeners, thanks to its annual releases around Worlds. With Sessions, it now has a steadier flow of releases, meaning a richer catalogue to explore and a more frequent presence in the Release Radar. For creators, this now means that on top of playing a Riot game, they’re also listening to Riot-created music, doubling the brand exposure and affinity in their content cycle. Even if a creator moves onto a competitor-brand product, there is still a likelihood that Sessions will carry with them to their next content.
League has said it themselves that this is the first step in offering more creator-friendly content, and I hope that this encourages other developers to invest more in tools and products that mutually benefit both creators and players. Earlier this year, Rockstar Games partnered with Famous DC10 club night, CircoLoco, to launch Dance-focused CircoLoco Records. I don’t know whether this is a long-term play to develop a creator-friendly catalogue of music, so I can’t say how this’ll impact their massive online creator community.
As a whole, creators and developers are finding solutions to solving the DMCA issue without the support of music conglomerates. What companies like Riot are doing helps pave the way to enable content creators to focus on building their own personal brand without fear of it being stripped away from them, all while developing new methods for their larger fanbase to engage beyond in-game and on social media.
I look forward to seeing what lessons other developers learn from this, and how it’ll be applied to future creator-focussed initiatives.
It’s good to be back! <3
JDodd
For all the fancy legal reasons, this work is my own and not representative of EA ✌🏼
Thank you to Sophie for playing the role of editor, thumbnail designer, and life-ruiner.