My Music Convergence: The Hit List

[Matt Kern]

I am the audio director for the company that makes Golden Tee and some other well known games.

A year or so ago I proposed a way to integrate artists into our products in such a way as to keep the integrity of the game intact while at the same time giving people a way to discover new music.

Its called The Hit List.

Basically people can play one of our games, go into the options menu and turn on the hit list and the music will play behind the game. I saw it as a way to possibly expose our games to a group of people that were not familiar with it.

We have had varied amounts of success.

The good points:
We got the feature in 2 games so far and we have had some great music. We had some local chicago acts and also Dave Matthews for the 2009 version.
It is also pretty cheap to implement.

The bad points:
I think it has potential to draw a new audience to the game but it has been hard to put an ROI on it and that has made the project harder to push forward at times.

We are starting our third version and are working with Sonicbids on this round. We have some ideas that will be cool to try, but are short on time for this go around. Maybe next year for the cool ideas.

Here is the site I did:
TurnHitlistOn.com

If anyone has any feedback I would love to hear it.

Thanks

[John Patterson]

I think the idea is a good one and like all ideas, needs attention until it grabs hold.
I understand the ROI issue and question that myself. I am sure that a movie soundtrack can attract an audience to its' movie, but you'd never know if the soundtrack got them to see it without a way to measure that. I'd look in this relationship and see what models exists there.

[Matt Kern]

Nice insight John. I will ponder that angle a bit.

Thanks again.

[Jazz]

I think its a great idea.

[Matt Kern]

Thanks Jazz. I appreciate it.

[Josh Kaplan]

Hey Matt,
Question, has the licensing process slowed down the process because of the difficulty in licensing the music from the artists or their labels? You could potentially speed that up by working with independent musicians. This would lower your cost and probably speed the process up. However, if the goal is to attract people to the game because of the music, it may be harder to do with lesser known artists.

Another option is to speak to one or two artists and commission exclusive works just for the game. You could then promote the download on your site as well as Itunes/Rhapsody/Amazon etc (recoup some of the license fee this way). Include the music in commercials for the game and of course during the gameplay itself.

Probably rambling here, but I have some other ideas if you want to discuss.

Thanks
Josh