The Realities and Opportunities of Licensing Music for Games 

The music and video game industries are teaming up for sync licensing opportunities, but many rights-holders are losing out due to pre-cleared music libraries and compulsory licensing. Learn how game placements can revive entire catalogs, offering a lucrative and overlooked revenue stream for artists and their estates.

Beyond Excuses – Understanding the Reality and Opportunities of Licensing Music for Games

By Deborah Mannis-Gardner, Owner/President of DMG Clearances

Much has been said regarding the music and video game industries and how they work together when it comes to sync and clearances. However, much of the conversation has been focused on how to make things easier for licensors, usually via pre-cleared music libraries or calls for compulsory licensing. These solutions would certainly speed up the process, though at the expense of songwriters, publishers, and other rights-holders who then lose the ability to negotiate their royalty rate or review the context in which their song would be used. A better approach would be to educate rights-holders, including everyone from major artists to family members who have taken over a musician’s estate, about what they can gain from licensing.

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 main complaint I hear from gaming companies is that there are too many copyright holders per song, making music licensing for games prohibitive. While the amount of copyright holders on a recording can certainly be daunting, it 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.

Fallout & The Ink Spots

Let’s take a recent example from the gaming and TV franchise Fallout. In each of the games, there are radio stations you can tune in to and listen to a selection of songs that are played as though you’re listening to a normal radio station. In Fallout 3, this station is Galaxy News Radio; Fallout 4, Diamond City Radio; and in Fallout 76, Appalachia Radio. One song that is featured on all of these stations is The Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” After being featured as a song in each of the above games, it was used as the main music for the much-anticipated Fallout TV show trailer, and then was used in the TV show itself on Amazon Prime. 

“streaming numbers jump to 115 million on Spotify alone”

As a result of these syncs, the song has been put on multiple albums, seen its streaming numbers jump to 115 million on Spotify alone, and is featured as the lead song on the “Fallout Radio” playlist, which has nearly 11,000 followers on Spotify. The TV sync on its own led to the song doubling in streams to over 1 million weekly plays within weeks of the show’s premiere, and placed the song at #1 on the Billboard Top TV Songs list in April of 2024. Beyond that, all of The Ink Spots’ most popular songs have been featured in five Fallout games since the franchise’s inception in 1997, have been used in the TV show in multiple episodes, and in other video games as a result. This doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of thousands of TikToks, Reels, and other UGC content types that are being created with these songs talking about the games or the show. 

One small PC game 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. The song then continued to build upon its own success with more and more syncs in different media and, most importantly, created fans out of those who never would have interacted with the band’s music otherwise.

Not too bad for a track released all the way back in 1941! It’s the kind of example that should be used to teach rights-holders the possibilities of video game sync licensing. Once they understand the benefits, they are more likely to make themselves available for negotiations. That is the real solution – not throwing compulsory royalties into a black box they will never see a penny from.

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.

Licensees, including game studios, should have empathy for artists and songwriters who have seen their revenue streams dwindle significantly over time – just look at what Spotify is now trying to do with bundling to drive down songwriter royalties.

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. 

Deborah Mannis-Gardner – The “Queen of Sample Clearance” according to Billboard, Forbes, Midem, Music Week, Okayplayer, Variety, and more — is the go-to expert for global music rights clearances. After starting DMG Clearances, Inc. in 1996, Deborah’s sample clearance skills quickly became legendary, and she has cleared releases for artists including Drake, Tyler the Creator, DJ Khaled, Eminem, De La Soul, Pop Smoke, Logic, Justin Bieber, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean, Jay-Z, John Legend, Megan Thee Stallion, Big K.R.I.T., Brockhampton, French Montana, Big Sean, J. Cole, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and more. Deborah has also handled music clearances for video games such as Rockstar Games franchises “Grand Theft Auto” and “Red Dead Redemption,” as well as Turtle Rock Studios’ “Back 4 Blood”; metaverse platforms such as Meta and Roblox, including a live concert from Post Malone; films by Martin Scorsese, The Coen Brothers, and Richard Linklater; TV series on networks such as HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and Paramount+; ad campaigns for Google, Ciroc, and Kmart; and podcasts such as Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Broken Record” and Dave Chappelle, Talib Kweli, and yasiin bey’s “The Midnight Miracle.” In addition, Deborah has handled Grand Rights clearance for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway sensation “Hamilton” and music clearances for its release on Disney+, as well as political campaign music clearances for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. Deborah was the award-winning music supervisor of HBO’s Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine docu-series “The Defiant Ones,” and recently expanded her music supervision credits with the Neil Bogart biopic “Spinning Gold” and U2 Sarajevo documentary “Kiss the Future,” which was produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. She was recently named to the Forbes 50 Over 50 list and Billboard’s Women in Music and R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players lists.