How far we’ve come from the scratchy, monophonic music loops of those early 1970s arcade video games? Pac Man and Pole Position were two of the first games to mix joystick cut-and-thrust with theme tunes and sound effects; a groundbreaking achievement back in the day, but utterly primitive put alongside today’s gameworld offerings. The latest buzz, of course, surrounds urban-popsters N-Dubz, who have made their latest music video entirely within a computer game and sparked fervent industry discussion on the potential future role gaming might play in music promotion.
In truth, consoles and computers have been close to the music business for some time but it is the scale of N-Dubz’s current promotional activity that is getting commentators more excited than usual. Will Guyatt at IGN UK, the UK’s largest video game and entertainment network, agrees there is potential for closer, more creative ties: “The games and music industries have been hand-in-hand for decades. But the news surrounding the demise of Guitar Hero will only service to kick the relationship between them onto the next phase, hopefully delivering some much needed innovation.”
Juxtaposed with N-Dubz’s triumphant cyber-marketing is the news that major games publisher Activision will no longer be running its flagship DJ Hero and Guitar Hero ‘rhythm’ formats. In recent years, the Hero products have both captured the public’s imagination and driven major music sales – downloadable content with Guitar Hero, for example, generated sales of 40 million songs globally between 2007 and 2009; and this despite only having 100 tracks to choose from. Early DJ Hero download figures were also, reportedly, strong.
However, sales of Activision’s most recent Hero titles slowed significantly over Christmas, prompting a rapid re-think. Guyatt sees this as a huge opportunity for the gaming and music worlds to help one another more effectively. “Music games like Guitar Hero and their ‘iTunes-like stores’ earned vast sums of money while consumer interest was hot, but now these are on the wane, both industries will find new ways of working together. We’re seeing a huge change in attitude towards the gaming industry from musicians, which we all hope means decent, original tunes for games.”
It is the Sony Playstation 3’s much heralded (and advertised) LittleBigPlanet2 through which N-Dubz have found their own decent, original way to present new music. The game-driven video to latest single Took It All Away features all three band members – Dappy, Fazer, Tulisa – as ‘sackpeople’, LittleBigPlanet’s indigenous, customisable characters. The concept, devised by PlayStation Marketing Director Alan Duncan, allowed gaming fans to help shape N-Dubz’s finished product and, ultimately, saved the outfit’s label a tidy sum of cash.
“People are becoming aware that stereotypes of gamers being spotty teenagers in their bedrooms aren’t true,” Duncan explains. “Gaming has grown up. It’s become a lot more sophisticated on phones and various platforms.” If a few people didn’t buy his N-Dubz vision, he adds, then many more within the music industry did and the current single’s success now speaks, very loudly, for itself.
In the 1990s, games developers often went beyond the call of duty to persuade sceptical record labels and music-makers to lend them music for their latest products – they found it difficult to appreciate the benefits of using a channel beyond their traditional scope of activity. Today, having seen the success of DJ Hero and Guitar Hero, those ‘musos’ are knocking more regularly on developers’ doors.
“Norman Cook hid the fact he sound-tracked a Smurfs game for nearly a decade” Guyatt says, “but former Pop Will Eat Itself frontman and composer Clint Mansell is splashed all over the publicity for the forthcoming Mass Effect 3 release, where he’s writing a bespoke score. The music industry’s position has definitely changed.”
The last year or so is perhaps the best indicator of that; a surge of smart, collaborative games, mobile apps and interactive digital forums flooding the club and wider music marketplaces. Superstar DJ and producer David Guetta has been particularly busy, following December’s Facebook-focussed game Pump It with this month’s remarkably intuitive iPad ‘studio’ app, Electrobeats.
Pump It gives Guetta fans an opportunity to play his music, as well as play with it. Promoting recent Rihanna-fronted single Who’s That Chick? the ‘rhythm’ game rewards fans for successfully re-creating his songs by unlocking new music, merchandise prizes and Spotify subscriptions. And it has proved supremely popular - during the app’s ‘beta’ launch, over 15,000 users actively played for more than 15 minutes per track, and 50 per cent shared with, and competed against friends across the Facebook site. Guetta has a total of some 13 million Facebook fans.
Electrobeats, meanwhile, enables users to run the rule over a thousand different sounds, samples and pre-recorded drum patterns, before crafting their ideal club banger, refining it with modulating tools, and exporting it to iTunes or even ‘grown up’ software like Ableton Live and Pro Tools. Surprisingly cheap to download, it’s another way in which Guetta is using the gaming frontier to engage with and strengthen his audience.
He isn’t the only one. Last October, Brit Award-winning rock band Arcade Fire launched forward-thinking Google Chrome/HTML5 project The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive ‘short’ set to Fire tune We Used To Wait and with visuals linked cleverly to users’ childhood memories. By requesting a childhood address, the project is able to link to Google Street Maps and Street View, and incorporate images of your hometown in the subsequent music video. “The Wilderness Downtown is real cross-industry innovation and a tantalising glimpse of how music and games could work together in the future,” Guyatt excitedly suggests.
The future as major label Atlantic sees it is, at least in part, console gaming like their Def Jam Rapstar software. Available across all key console platforms, Atlantic’s hip-hop driven game, launched last October, enables players to record their own tracks and videos, upload efforts for friends to vote on, and potentially land a deal with one of Atlantic’s revered A&Rs – talent permitting, of course….
“Artists should be always thinking of new ways to market themselves,” N-Dubz’ Fazer, 24, claims. “We’re expanding each year, looking to do new things to gain new fans in different age groups.”
Certainly, in-depth industry research suggests that revenues from conventional music A&R could fall by as much as $500m per year, worldwide. Global economies are still incredibly volatile and the issue of illegal song downloading refuses to go away, the combination of which is hitting the music industry hard.
On the other hand the gaming industry continues to expand, ably supported by an online subscription model marrying traditional entertainment subscription frameworks with a rewarding ‘social club’ dynamic. Members collaborate with one another and effectively co-create their entertainment experiences, the value of their subscription therefore increasing over time. It’s an attractive proposition that record labels, and even music equipment manufacturers, are giving increasingly serious thought to.
Meantime, music-based apps and games continue to grow their share of the lucrative gaming space. And even straightforward music licensing still has a part to play. “Game titles like Wipeout in the mid-1990s made track licensing successful, and behemoths like FIFA [Soccer] should be publically praised for taking an increasingly eclectic approach to their soundtracks, routinely securing music from around the globe” Guyatt comments. “Seeing a 14-year-old relative nodding his head to a catchy afro-beat track shows me that licensed music has the potential to turn on a massive consumer audience to artists from other continents. It is another outlet for the music industry.”
The game is on...
