Ever wonder how the mesmerizing tunes in your favorite video games come to be? With 24 years of experience in music supervision, our guest Sergio Pimentel is here to quench your curiosity. From his work at PlayStation and Activision Blizzard on beloved games such as SingStar and Guitar Hero, to his journey of setting up Synchronicity Music, Sergio's insights will take you on a fascinating expedition into the industry. He also reveals the behind-the-scenes of his experiences at Big Sync Music and Ninja Tune Records, shedding light on the nitty-gritty of copyright in music supervision.
Navigating the complex process of finding and licensing commercial music, Pimentel discusses the role of a music supervisor. He offers his perspective on mediating between different opinions on music, starting from the inception of a game with just a concept document. From the importance of social media in tracking down artists and publishers, to dealing with publishing splits, Sergio's expertise provides a captivating peek into the challenges and rewards of his role.
As we wrap up our conversation, we explore the evolving landscapes of the gaming and music industries. Discussing the competitive nature of game publishers and the rise of a DIY approach amongst game developers, we draw parallels with the world of music. Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of the various paths to market for games, and discover how game publishers shape the industry. Join us for an exciting exploration of the music that sets the rhythm of the gaming industry.
Ever wonder how the mesmerizing tunes in your favorite video games come to be? With 24 years of experience in music supervision, our guest Sergio Pimentel is here to quench your curiosity. From his work at PlayStation and Activision Blizzard on beloved games such as SingStar and Guitar Hero, to his journey of setting up Synchronicity Music, Sergio's insights will take you on a fascinating expedition into the industry. He also reveals the behind-the-scenes of his experiences at Big Sync Music and Ninja Tune Records, shedding light on the nitty-gritty of copyright in music supervision.
Navigating the complex process of finding and licensing commercial music, Pimentel discusses the role of a music supervisor. He offers his perspective on mediating between different opinions on music, starting from the inception of a game with just a concept document. From the importance of social media in tracking down artists and publishers, to dealing with publishing splits, Sergio's expertise provides a captivating peek into the challenges and rewards of his role.
As we wrap up our conversation, we explore the evolving landscapes of the gaming and music industries. Discussing the competitive nature of game publishers and the rise of a DIY approach amongst game developers, we draw parallels with the world of music. Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of the various paths to market for games, and discover how game publishers shape the industry. Join us for an exciting exploration of the music that sets the rhythm of the gaming industry.
So hi, my name's Sergio Pimentel. I'm the founder and music supervisor at Synchronicity Music. This is my 24th year in the world of SYNC and music supervision. I started out working at probably the first music supervision company, couchlife, that worked on exclusively on video games, in-game uses, trailers and advertising for games. I was there for quite a number of years. We'd go and pitch to a number of game developers and publishers. We worked with the likes of Electronic Arts and Konami and I'd go and pitch to the great people over at PlayStation in London on the number of games that they were working. After many meetings with them and talk of a game that they had in research and development that was going to need quite a lot of music if it got green lit, they were kind of looking to work with us on that. As it came closer to the time that this game was being green lit, I think they suddenly realised that the game was going to need a lot of music and what turned into let's outsource this turned into, actually, you know what. We should probably set up our own department to work on this game and anything else that we've got that needs licensed music. Anyway, that game was SingStar and I ended up getting hired to set up the music licensing department over at PlayStation, where I was there for about five and a half years. From about 2003, grew the department quite considerably. There was quite a few of us in the end, three consultants in Europe working in certain countries on SingStar as well as all the other great games that PlayStation developed, like Gran Turismo, little Big Planet, god of War. After that I was poached by the good people over at Activision Blizzard who wanted to do a similar thing and grow Guitar Hero, I guess in the same way that SingStar had grown, with very localised content. So I went over to Activision Blizzard again, set up the department over here in London and got the great chance then to work on some amazing games like Guitar Hero, dj Hero where I also got the chance to do some kind of brand ambassador deals with some DJs as well as Music Supervision and Call of Duty and a lot of the other great titles that those guys develop and publish.
Speaker 1:Following that time, I ended up setting up a Music Supervision company prior to Synchronicity so this would have been about 12 years ago with some old colleagues of mine that ran a music production company that focused very much on video game scores. They had a studio over in Oxfordshire and when they knew that I was leaving Activision Blizzard, they were like well, look, why don't we set up a Music Supervision arm to the company? You can run it from London, ultimately, where a lot of the labels and music publishers are, and a lot of our clients were in London as well. So we did that and then, following that stint there, I spent four years working at Big Sync Music, who were the mandated music agency, working on all of Unilever's advertising campaigns globally. So Unilever think of the second biggest spender in advertising globally. You'll find most of their products in your home, in your kitchen or your bathroom. So I spent a few years working on links and other campaigns like that, which is great.
Speaker 1:And then, before setting up Synchronicity Music, which is about two and a half years ago, should have done it a lot longer than that I got the opportunity to work at a record label and music publisher rolled into one, which was the only piece of experience I guess I'd never had. I'd always been music supervisor in the middle or working on the client music user side, but never on the copyright side, and it was a label that I loved from its birth, ninja Tune records had the opportunity to go over there and basically work the recording catalogue and the publishing catalogue across all media. Obviously, games was a real focus because of my background, but I did a lot of advertising and, interestingly, did a lot of film and TV from a kind of copyright owner side which I'd never really done before and that was similar, or more similar lead times, to games. So a real opportunity to really get creative, which was great, and they were very happy for me to do the music supervision stuff on the side. So those two kind of went hand in hand and we were doing that and then I finally got that last piece of experience. So I've now, if you pardon the analogy, I've sat around every part of the dinner table and my, I guess a work as a supervisor who's got that kind of experiences again pardon the analogy is to make sure that everyone at that dinner party has the best experience. Really you want them to come back for another dinner party. So if everyone's happy the copyright owners, the clients, the artists, the writers you get the best work when all the people around that table are kind of happy and no one feels like they've been compromised Right.
Speaker 1:So I guess the role of a music supervisor and for this I'll talk about the role of a music supervisor in the video game world more video game trailers and video game adverts. So the music supervisor tends to sit between the client. So our clients can be anyone from the developer of the video game or it can be the publisher of the video game. So examples of video game publishers Electronic Arts, konami, of video game publishers. They make game. They make games across all of the platforms and consoles, so they're kind of independent, I guess third party if you like. You've then got the first party. So the likes of PlayStation, microsoft, xbox and Nintendo. They will have third party developers not owned by them developing games for them. But they'll also have first party developers that they own working for them With advertising and trailers. I mean, with us we tend to deal still with the games publishers and the developers, because that's who we have a lot of the relationships with. They might bring in the trailer house for us to deal with as well, or the agency, but we're generally dealing with them. I get the impression that with many others they might be dealing directly with the trailer house or with the advertising agency working on the campaign. So you're kind of sitting in the middle of all of these kind of stakeholders.
Speaker 1:I guess you know, if we're looking at in-game music use, I mean, take me back to my days at PlayStation where we'd often have artists or people from the music industry that we'd heard were interested in working in games, maybe doing a score for a game, and we'd invite people in. So I remember in one particular case we had some people in and at the time the studio was working on a number of games, but one of the main ones was the Getaway, black Monday, which was the sequel to the Getaway. It was kind of an action game based in London, kind of very gangster set in the real world, kind of an open sandbox type game, a little bit like Grand Theft Auto, where you could drive and run about in London. You know, they kind of recreated London and I remember we were in this open-plan floor where there's probably about 70 to 80 people on that floor all working on this one game and I think someone said oh, you know what's everyone doing here? It's like this is just one game, you know. So those are the programmers over there and that's the producer on the game, who's basically the person responsible for knowing exactly what's going on across all the disciplines and is responsible for the budget. So you're kind of sitting in between those. That team and I guess probably your main contact will probably be maybe a producer and an audio manager and audio director working on the game, and then you're also sitting in between, depending on what you're sourcing music wise, but if it's commercial music it'll be the record labels and the music publishers. So you'll be dealing with the synchronization departments within the labels and publishers. Those are the departments that are responsible for licensing out their music into different media. You'll be dealing with them and then you'll be dealing with the clients as well. So it's a very I mean this is applicable across music supervision in all areas film, tv and advertising.
Speaker 1:You're kind of a bit of a mediator because you know music is such a universal thing. It's probably the one discipline in game development where Everyone's got an opinion right. You know everyone's got music that they love at home. You don't often get a programmer Going to another program and saying you're someone going to another program and go your. What language you coding the game in? You don't want to code in that language, you want to code in this language. But everyone has their favorite music, favorite bands, favorite artists. So you know, if you're working in a development team full of seventy people working on a game, you can be guaranteed that each one of those will have an idea of what they think should go in the game. So you're really having to mediate that You're.
Speaker 1:So let's start from the very beginning of the game. Okay, generally. So taking taking back to us now, okay, so we'll have a client come to us with a game that they're working on. Often, if you, if you're kind of engaged nice and early which is the best thing for a music supervisor the more time you have the better, the more creative you can get. But it'll often start so a recent title we started looking at that's being developed out of the US. It's an action game.
Speaker 1:When we first looked at it, there was nothing but a concept document, basically a pdf, with a very top down narrative of the game, a few of the locations, a few of the main characters, and that was it. You know, maybe a little bit of artwork from from the artists and the designers just to give you a feeling of the game there might be. Usually there's a presentation, a deck, with some extra information on there. You know the target audience, any influences that they've had from other media. You know, often there are influences from film and TV and sometimes music and so yeah, so you start with with that. A little bit later on you start seeing some visuals. So you know, the second thing we saw in in this case was A vertical slice which is essentially, in the gaming world, A short demonstration. It might be a level, it might be part of the game, but it's a slice of it that's done so that the publisher of the game can actually see it working and see how it's going to look. So it's, it's relatively polished, and we saw that only a few months ago.
Speaker 1:So on a game like that, we're involved in licensing commercial music. But in this case as well, we're also going to be involved in working with the audio director To come up with ideas for composers or it might be recording artists or writers to do a score as well, to go with it. So from there, our role really is to kind of get under the skin of the game. So you know, all of these concept documents, as much artwork as you can get hold of, any visuals that you can see. If there's any working demos then again, and you're working very closely with, usually, the producer, in this case, on this game, there's a creative director working on it, so we're working very closely with him and the producer, who's amazing. She's super, super great and then it's really. So what we're doing at the moment is we there's a specific time that the game is set in, so a lot of the commercial music will be from that time. So at the moment we are doing a lot of music searches. So the team over at Synchronicity are looking at the kind of all the parameters you know, target, audience, this time that the game is set in, a little bit about the game and just doing music searches to see, you know, songs that might work for the soundtrack so we tend to do those in batches will do a music search, will then fire off lots of ideas to the team. So at the moment it's really the creative director, the producer and the audio director and just kind of coming up with, as I say this, this title is about three years away from release, so very, very early on. We're just putting, I guess, wish lists together of songs that we'd like to go for once those being green lit.
Speaker 1:Then is the part that I I enjoy quite a lot and I think some people hate this, but it's the. It's trying to find out who owns the songs. So it's finding out who owns the recordings, and that could be a record label. Often if it's commercial music, there'll be a record label behind there. In this day and age where artists are able to DIY themselves, it might actually be contacting an artist direct and dealing with them. They might own their own recording. And then that's probably the easier side.
Speaker 1:It's when you're trying to find the publishing and particularly the different publishing splits. We're working on a title at the moment that I have to say, in my 24 years of being in this world, have got the most complex publishing splits I've ever come across, just in terms of some writers are just very, very difficult to find. They're unpublished, they're unmanaged, so they've got no management and in some cases it's almost like they don't exist. You know, we spend a lot of time if people are not on a label or if they're unpublished and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to find. They don't have their own website. We spend a lot of our time stalking people on social media, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, less so on Facebook, even on LinkedIn, if you've got a famous record producer that's got split in some publishing. I found a few of them on LinkedIn and then sent them a message and said hello, I'm a music supervisor, you've got sharing this song we really like to use on this game and then you're able to contact them. So there's a lot of sleuth work, which I quite enjoy.
Speaker 1:As I say, it gets a little bit frustrating sometimes where clearly these people don't want to be found and with SYNC being such an important revenue stream for the music industry now you do sometimes think do you not want to make yourselves available a little bit more easy to find? You might only have 5% share in the publishing, but everyone else that's already approved. You know we'd really like this to happen. So, yeah, at that point then it's very much a spreadsheet kind of work. A lot of research goes into it.
Speaker 1:Recordings generally a lot of the streaming platforms. If you go into those, because a lot of those deals have been done over the last few years they're usually a good place to go to find out which is the record label that you need to contact for a particular recording. And then, on the publishing side, usually a lot of the research we do are on the performing rights organization databases. So over here in the UK we use the MCPSPRS database and generally you can get that you're dependent on a lot of these databases being up to date, which most of them are pretty good. I guess the newer a song is, the less likely it would have been fully registered on some of these databases.
Speaker 1:So then comes the proper sleuth work and it's trying to find who owns what you know. You might find in one case that a particular publisher on the PRO database is quoted as having a writer. You then contact that publisher only to find that they've just lost that piece of repertoire and that writers then left. Ok, do you know where they've gone? No, we don't. And then you're kind of back to square one and you're you know, hopefully the publisher that have just lost the rights will put you in touch with management and then you can find out who they signed with. So that's where a lot of the time is taken up. You're then researching the ownership after that and when you know generally, then it's beginning to start the whole licensing process. And then it's you've already got this information from the producer and the team working on it. Even before that.
Speaker 1:That stage was the budget that's available for the music. So you know what budget will it be available, available for any licensed commercial music and any budget that might be available for a score. You know a bespoke piece of music or the entire score for the game. And I guess when you're looking at score or bespoke music you have to factor in two things to the budget. There's obviously what you're paying the composer, the producer, to write that piece of music. But for example, if you're working on a kind of a fantasy action game where generally don't tend to hear much commercial music so take a game like God of War it's a lot, it's very much kind of orchestral score with kind of choral vocals in there. So there's not much commercial music. Obviously, if you're going to record an orchestral score it's going to sound so much better with a live orchestra. So you need to build that into your budget. If you've got a finite budget, you've got so much for the composition side of it. But then you need to make sure that you've got enough to go into a studio. And you know I've had the pleasure and privilege to record scores for games at places like Abbey Road Studio, one with like amazing Full orchestras over there with amazing players. So you have to factor all of that stuff in.
Speaker 1:Then at the point that you start, you're ready to kind of start licensing. It's about really working with the team and usually then there's someone from the legal department over on the game side who sort of basically say what uses they need to be included in what becomes the deal memo. Finally, which is usually a one-pager, maybe two pages at most. It's pretty short, a short form piece of paper with the major terms in there. On the game side, the stuff that generally appears on there is the media that the music is being licensed for. Generally it will be all platforms, so that covers a lot of the consoles, pc, if there's any promotional use included in that deal memo. So you've got the in-game use and then you've got some promotional use that is usually carved out as being not out of context advertising. So the type of stuff that usually you can include in an in-game deal memo is some promotional uses that are deemed to be in context.
Speaker 1:By that I mean an area for marketing that's become more and more important over the last few years for games companies, certainly with social media are well, you've got YouTubers that now are up there streaming games. Other platforms I guess, like Twitch as well, where you've got a lot of streamers showcasing new games. They've got a lot of followers, so this has become an area really great for marketing. If you've got a streamer who's got tens, hundreds of thousands of followers, viewers, then you want them to market your game because they're going to be reaching a lot of gamers in those cases. Or it can be an Instagrammer who again will stream themselves playing the game. So when we say in context, it basically means that that license will cover for any use where maybe one of these people is streaming themselves playing the game. So the music on the stream appears as it would do if you're playing the game in context Versus out of context, where usually there are separate licenses, a lot more money involved in that.
Speaker 1:A great example of that is taking lots of edits from the game and creating a new film with lots of edited slots and then editing a piece of music over that. It's not in context anymore because you've edited lots of clips together and the music sitting on top of it. It never appears like that in-game, so it's out of context. So anyway, you work with the team, put the deal memo terms together, make sure that everyone's happy and that you really have covered everything. I say that because if you haven't covered everything and you've got the deal memo out with the budget, it's always difficult when you go back to add anything else after that. It's always difficult to do that within the budget that you've already got. So it's very important to try and for the client, the game company, to put down as many of the uses as they think they may need. As I say, we've generally covered all of them. Really that come up it's in-game use and then promotional uses around the game.
Speaker 1:In context, there might be something in there about the and I guess more so in this day and age where a lot of games companies are now releasing game scores more original scores rather than licensed music from video games, although Rockstar Games used to release box sets. So I think the one I remember really well that I really wanted a copy of but I never managed to get my hands on, was the Grand Theft Auto Vice City box set, which was music from the 80s, which I probably the only decade of pop music that I truly love, and it was beautifully put together packaging, but generally there's a lot of very cool record labels that have come up over the last eight, nine years that exclusively put video game scores out on very cool limited edition vinyl with beautiful covers, and a few that do games and kind of B movies, kind of cult movies as well. So you might have some wording in there that alludes to the fact that we might put a soundtrack album out at a certain stage and then usually there are usually the composer will collect their share of anything if the soundtrack is released and then, yeah, then you're out there going out to record labels. Music publishers might be writers, direct artists, direct. It might be sync agents who are. So.
Speaker 1:Sync agents are agents that rep lots of different catalogs. Generally they'll rep catalogs by small independent record labels and small independent music publishers that maybe don't have the luxury to hire their own internal sync person. So what those people tend to do is they'll find a reputable sync agency I mean, there can be anywhere in the world, but a lot of them are here in Europe, there's quite a few in the US and what they will do is they'll listen to your music and then deem whether they, whether your style, fits nicely into, I guess, their catalog and repertoire the really great ones and I know I've got a number of friends that are sync reps here in London and in the UK the really great ones will actually say no sometimes when they feel like they're spreading. They've got so much already that they don't want to feel that they're spreading themselves too thinly. You know, it's, I guess, like a record label right, if you assigned to, let's say, a major record label where they've got millions of copyrights and you're a new, emerging artist, you're probably going to get lost in. You know the large profile artists or the frontline people. You know those guys usually getting requests direct anyway, because people know you could get lost, whereas on an independent the catalogs are much smaller, there's less music. So you might find, if you don't have a publisher or a record label, a sync agency is also another option for you. So, yes, so we kind of tend to deal with all of those people.
Speaker 1:We have an occasion at the moment where on one track there's a very obscure track from a European country. Only God knows how the creative director even found it, because it's not from the UK and it's from it's about 40 years old and it was one of those where literally all we could find was it's on discogs as a release and that song is on YouTube and it's not up on any of the digital platforms, streaming platforms, it's nowhere else, and so I thought, like this one's going to be an interesting one. Anyway, have great friends in sync departments all over the world and spoke to a good friend of mine that works in sync department. One of the majors said don't suppose you know these guys there from this decade. And he said leave it with me.
Speaker 1:Two hours later got an email with a mobile phone number for this guy from the band who's not on email, doesn't have a record label, owns his own recording, doesn't have a publishing deal, so owns the composition as well, and hasn't got a clue about licensing in the sync world, but does speak English. So when you're ready to call, call him and just be very careful and explain everything. So, yeah, you occasionally have occasions like that where you're really having to take everything, really explain the things very carefully, and there's a good reason we haven't contacted them yet, because we contact them now, to the time that we're actually gonna need to license the song. There's gonna be such a long period of time and if he doesn't understand our world, the worst thing would probably freak him out where they disappear to. So you know what we're putting him on ice and probably call Just as we're beginning to actually license the song for it. So that's the kind of going out and then finding people and reaching them.
Speaker 1:Then, once the approval start coming in From the labels, the publishers, the writers, the artists, through managers, through whichever way, even directly you then it's really a kind of a it's an admin job really idea. I hate to say this for Anyone that's wanting to get into me, just to vision, to think it's all really really sexy and going to get the whole time and doing lunches with clients. But it's a lot of sitting in front of spreadsheets and tracking approvals and Looking over approvals via email you know you might get signed deal memo back in an email attachments making sure that everything you've asked for, any restrictions that have been put in there, just tracking everything very Clearly. On the publishing side, making sure that all the publishing splits add up to a hundred, that you've got all the writers included.
Speaker 1:There are certain genres that are kind of notorious for lots of publishing splits and, in some cases, disputes. A lot of hip hop, rap, rap particularly the old school stuff that was generally sampled and in those days, you know, people just sampled without kind of legitimately licensing anything. Those can have many, many splits. And I remember trying to license an old school hip hop track by Rackim Cut, cut a couple of decades back now, which was in disputes, and it had been in dispute since it being recorded. And I always, when I remember, when I'm doing some research, always go up and have a look at the PRO database Entry for that song just to see if it's ever been resolved. You know it's quite a big song and you think, wouldn't it be great if someone could just get all of the people involved in it just to go look, you know what, let's approve and put the money in an escrow account so that when it, when we finally decide what the shares are to each of us, is a large pot of money rather than no, sorry, you can't license it because no one's agreed on the split so far and it's just earning no money, no money.
Speaker 1:Then it's a lot of tracking depending on what you need for the game. So, on games like Sing star or a game let's sing, which is a similar game that we work on now, a guitar hero, where you then need assets on top of it. So you know, a lot of the singing games tend to use the original recordings. They use the original music video. So then you're having source, at the very least the instrumental and then the full mix and then the music video digitally. Many of these games will have the album or the single cover in the song selection screen, so you're then also licensing that artwork. The singing games will have the lyrics printed on the bottom of the screen with a little ball bouncing up and down on it, so the publishing deal memos. You need to make sure that you're getting the rights for the lyrics to be reproduced in the game. So, yeah, then it's approvals coming in. You're requesting the assets that you need for the game.
Speaker 1:On the very first sing star game, I guess, where we were all a little bit green around the gills, not realizing that, of course you know anything that we need the original master recordings for so we can get the stems, there was some functionality in the first game where you could turn down the vocal. You could have the vocal is a bit of a guide while you were singing, and so you know, with the older, more catalog Songs, we were then trying to get the original masters that then we're on old tape that needed to then be baked and digitized and it was a bit of an eye opener in that so many old catalogs on tape just had been lost. So people going into the archive and saying we can't find our original recordings, so anyway Say, things have come on since those days and from what I can gather, there's a lot of a I now that can help take a kind of remove an acapella from a song or remove different parts from a song. So the days of trying to find the original master recordings where they were left, in Some hallway, somewhere record label or in some cases probably up in the loft of the engineer who decided to take it home one day because you know having the original master recording, so that great Recording, would have been something that for the grandkids look what I've got. And then after that you are then collating the assets and passing them on to the development studio who were then integrating the songs into the game.
Speaker 1:And you know, depending on the type of game, you know a commercial song might be put into the game in a cutscene maybe, where you know there's a radio playing in the background in the cutscene and it's being used kind of as a narrative to help the narrative on. Or if it's a racing game, it'll be playing, you know, maybe on rotation with the rest of the soundtrack whilst you're racing round Silverstone in your Ferrari. Or a lot of games more recently have got kind of interactive music. So video game video games have got video game audio engines now which generally, depending on what the player is doing on screen, will activate different stems from the mix. So if you take a commercial track, like a recorded track, it would, depending on what the player is doing.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if it's a stealth mission and you're sneaking around a warehouse, say, the engine will say, right, well, this is a stealthy mission, we want the music to come on, but we want the more ambient parts of that mix to come on to kind of play, kind of show that it's quite stealthy. So then the game engine will only activate the more kind of minimal parts of the mix. When you get seen. Then the game engine says, right, you've been seen by someone, so we want the music to be a little bit more frantic. Now it's giving you, giving the player, audio cues of what's going on as well, at which point. Then the game engine will start to activate more of the stems in that mix until ultimately you've got the full mix playing on there. But essentially what the game engine does is remix the song on the fly, if you like. So when you're dealing with the composer for bespoke music there's, it's very different to creating a piece of music with the beginning and middle and an end, because you're composing a piece of music that's going to be remixed on the fly by the game engine, depending on what the players doing.
Speaker 1:And I think probably that's one of the reasons why great composers from the film world and some really huge recording artists have wanted to get into scoring for games, because I think for them it's a new Process of writing and creating music, so that they want that challenge as well. There was a really, really great. We didn't work on it and I sadly didn't work on it while I was at playstation because it came out much later. But there was a little big planet game that came out only a few years ago where there was a lot of commercial music on there and they were able to get the stems and, depending on it's like a platform game little big planet, beautifully done and depending on what the player was doing, it activated different parts of the mix and it was great to watch, you know, artists like Madonna sort of having the stems for that sort of being activated. It was, you know, done really well. So so then that's the music then being integrated into the game and then I guess the Final part is once everything is done.
Speaker 1:Depending on in game stuff probably less so, because the labels, the publishers, the writers, the artists have kind of been told what's going on in the game, they might want to have a look. If it's a cut scene, they might want to have a look at the music to that cut scene to see it. But generally in game stuff, once it's done it's good to go where usually you need to. Once it's done, you need to then just send it over for kind of final approval tends to be trailers and add campaigns as well. So you might then at that point need to send the final film, the final trailer, the final campaign with cut downs over to the label and publisher, just so they can kind of see how it's finally ended up In the game working. And then after that Our job really is to start collating agreements, licenses from the record labels and the music publishers.
Speaker 1:So generally contracts that stipulate the the major deal terms that you had on the deal memo at the beginning. But the long forms will also have a lot of standards Language that the the label and the publishers will have in their contracts. And I guess the bigger the label and publisher, the less likely you're able to kind of negotiate any of those kind of long form standards clauses in there. You know, with an independent it's possibly a little bit easier. But then a lot of the majors have grown over the decades by acquiring catalogs. So you know, I guess with that in mind they're acquiring catalogs. In some cases the original contracts, the catalogs they've acquired a kind of not not readily available.
Speaker 1:So you often see a lot of wording that that there's just a lot of people covering themselves for certain things and then it's just, yeah, getting those ready for signature, both on the music side and on the client side, and then other than that they're kind of slightly peripheral things that a supervisor in the gaming world might do, which is look at sort of other opportunities, kind of cross promotional opportunities. You know, if you've got a song from a new artist, from an established artist who has a new album coming out around the time that the games coming out, the first single from that new album on your game, with the kind of lead times that one has on games, I guess You've got great opportunities to work with the marketing department, so the record labels, and try and do something a little bit cool that hopefully will help both products to cross promote each other. So when the single and the music comes out, the gaming company are doing something for the game which kind of helps that whole campaign and vice versa. You know it's not rocket science, you just need a bit of time to kind of look at opportunities and look into them and then after that, yeah, everything gets signed and then you're ready to go and the game gets released. Once that's done, then you might get approached for some out of context uses, which generally will be advertising or or kind of trailers, in which case then there might be some other stuff and then with those You're generally dealing with the marketing department. So there'll be a brand manager, maybe a product manager, in the marketing department working on that particular title.
Speaker 1:The producer on the video game might also be involved in. I just again to explain the producer on a video game, you usually have two producers. You have one producer on the video game publisher side and then another producer on the development side. So if it's a first party game so let's say, sing star, that was developed internally, that was developed internally at play station, so there was one producer on that on the development team At play station. If you've got a third party developer so a developer that's independent and will make games for whichever publisher out there wants to sign it, they will have a producer internally in the development studio because they're independent, so they track everything that's going on within the development internally. And then there will be a producer at the games publishing side that Interacts with the producer at the development, just keeping things on track from a Publisher points of view that. But ultimately the publishers are paying for the game to be developed.
Speaker 1:As I say, things have kind of changed a little bit over the last few years, I guess, like they have in the music industry, with artists being able to DIY themselves. So there are a few different routes to market still with games, but sort of generally the game publisher will, a number of them might. I guess it's like a band being signed right. They'll hear about this game that's doing the rounds, they'll want to see it, they'll ask for demos or see a vertical slice, and then there's a bit of a bidding war, in the same way that a band or an artist who's got lots of buzz around them might have a bit of a bidding war to sign to a label or write us to a music publisher. Music publisher.