Music and games – what a great combination. Or that’s what seemed to be the case during the Guitar Hero/Rock Band days of a few years ago. At it’s peak, artists, bands, labels and songwriters saw an unexpected and, for a time, significant income stream that promised to hold up a flagging music industry for a little while, only to have it go the way most that trends do and die almost overnight. After a short fling with gaming, music had struck out.
But gaming insiders knew that the experience was only the tip of the iceberg and that music would someday undergo a boom in gaming again, only in a different form. As Thom Kozik, then Vice-President of Online Gaming at Atari (and now COO of the Omnia Media multi channel network) forecasted in the second edition of my book Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age:
“There was a model that showed up in a few games about a decade ago where the player was offered an option on the music. Because the licensing models were what they were at the time, that didn’t work as well as hoped. Now all these decisions about taste that you can express in an online game puts the control in the consumer’s hands instead of the game studio or publisher. We’ll see the return of the “choose your own soundtrack” model, with direct, immediate payment by the consumer at the time they hit play.”
At least some of that prediction looks like it may have come to pass thanks to the recent announcement of a new service by Valve Software called Steam Music, which allows gamers to listen to songs from their digital libraries on their computer while playing a game. But what makes this even more interesting is that the rumors persist that the company is currently testing integration with Spotify to give the gamer a much wider choice of music than ever before. That expectation causes shivers down the spines of music execs everywhere, as a closer collaboration with an industry as huge as gaming (which Gartner measured at almost $79 billion in 2012) could amount to a significant and much needed new revenue stream.
Steam Music is a beta service of Steam, an iTunes-like marketplace for gamers, providing a central location to store both game data and digital purchases. With more than 65 million users of a prime music demographic, there’s probably not a better potential market for the music industry to aim for at the moment. It’s user numbers like these that show that if a collaboration between Steam Music and Spotify were to take off, it could mean that paid subscriptions to Spotify would see a significant bump, which of course, is good for all concerned.
The new music business is being built on streams, as downloads and physical distribution continue to take a sales hit. By expanding the music streaming user base to gaming with a demographic already predisposed to spend money both on subscriptions and music, the cross-over from digital downloads to streaming might take place a lot sooner than anyone ever predicted.
