Unlocking the Untapped Potential: How Video Game Sync Licensing Can Revive Music Catalogs

The music and video game industries have long been intertwined, with sync licensing opportunities offering a lucrative and often overlooked revenue stream for artists and their estates. However, many rights-holders have struggled to capitalize on this potential, hindered by pre-cleared music libraries and compulsory licensing. This article explores the reality and opportunities of licensing music for games, highlighting how game placements can breathe new life into entire catalogs and provide a path to reviving the fortunes of forgotten artists.

Unleashing the Power of Video Game Sync Licensing

Embracing the Untapped Potential

The music and video game industries have long been intertwined, with sync licensing opportunities offering a lucrative and often overlooked revenue stream for artists and their estates. However, many rights-holders have struggled to capitalize on this potential, hindered by pre-cleared music libraries and compulsory licensing. These solutions may speed up the process, but they come at the expense of songwriters, publishers, and other rights-holders, who lose the ability to negotiate their royalty rate or review the context in which their song would be used.

Reviving Forgotten Catalogs

Having a song featured in a game can provide opportunities that differ vastly from film and TV, and can revitalize a song or even a catalog with just one placement. The Ink Spots' "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" is a prime example of this. After being featured in multiple Fallout games, the song saw its streaming numbers jump to 115 million on Spotify alone, and was used as the main music for the much-anticipated Fallout TV show trailer and the show itself. This single opportunity in 1997 turned The Ink Spots' music into the recurring soundtrack of one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time and a show listed in Billboard's top 20 most valuable for syncs in 2024.

Empowering Overlooked Artists

The main complaint from gaming companies is that there are too many copyright holders per song, making music licensing for games prohibitive. However, this shouldn't be an excuse or barrier to clearing music for use in games. In fact, we should be excited that there are so many writers and artists on a song. In many cases, these are musicians who haven't gotten much recognition and who are now able to collect revenue they might not have ever seen otherwise. This is especially important in the wake of the 2010s, when termination rights began taking effect for many artists who were subject to predatory contracts, allowing them to get back the rights to their songs. Video game licensing is an opportunity for them to finally get a payday and reinvigorate interest in their songs on streaming, where catalog tracks typically do very well.

Honoring Artistic Legacies

This is especially important for songs where one or more of the original rights-holders is deceased. All four original songwriters of "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" have passed away, and their stakes in the song are now in the hands of others. While they were able to take advantage of the opportunity, there are many cases in which music rights are passed down to family members who have no idea how to manage them, and significant portions of a song's publishing become unlicensable because the owners simply cannot be located. It is our duty to find them and make them aware of the value of the catalog they are sitting on so they can honor their ancestor's legacy by keeping their music alive, all while making some good money themselves from syncs.

Fostering Collaboration and Empathy

Licensees, including game studios, should have empathy for artists and songwriters who have seen their revenue streams dwindle significantly over time. The solution to this problem is not to overhaul the system to provide more compulsory licensing opportunities to make things easier (and often cheaper) for video game companies. Licensing songs should be a joint effort between publishers and game studios. We're not curing cancer, we're working in entertainment, and we should be cooperating to make sure that the end product we're working together to create is excellent for the consumer and provides them with an experience they want to come back to time and time again. Music is emotional for those who created it, those who listen to it, and those who interact with it, and everyone should keep that in mind as they work together to bring these projects to fruition.