Adding licensed music to video games has a reputation for being a notoriously complex and challenging process. But California-based company Styngr aims to make it a whole lot easier.
The company was founded in 2020 with the goal of allowing developers and publishers to seamlessly integrate licensed music into their titles, with Styngr taking care of all the tricky negotiations with music companies.
To help on that front, Styngr has brought in Stephen Cooper, former CEO of Warner Music Group, to act as chairman.
Cooper’s tenure at Warner lasted from 2011 to 2023, and saw the company’s revenues more than double to over $6 billion, partly as a result of Warner moving quickly to embrace streaming under his watch.
Cooper thinks that historically, the music industry has been stricken with “technophobia.”
“At the end of the ’90s, when Napster came around, as opposed to understanding file sharing and what they could do with that, they sued,” he says. And when Spotify emerged a few years later, he adds, “they were scared to death of that.”
“They are just so worried about tech, and they’re so worried about creating new precedents that they just hunker down and resist.”
“Being an outsider to music, it was easier to cope, because I hadn’t been marinated in music for my entire career,” says Cooper, who has worked in various industries, including telecoms and chemicals.
“So when Spotify came out, I’m like to my team at Warner, ‘Hey guys, we’re going all in on this’, because not being from music, I could see being able to rent all of the world’s music for $10 a month ultimately was better than somebody buying five albums a year.”
Like it eventually learnt to embrace streaming, the music industry has gradually opened up to the opportunities in video gaming – although the process for securing licensed music is often still mired in bureaucracy.
Licensing issues
Alex Tarrand, the co-founder of Styngr, explains that typically, a ‘sync’ licensing model is used in video games. A sync is where a music track is licensed for use with specific visual content, like an advert, film, or game.
The trouble is, securing a sync takes a lot of time, says Tarrand. “Songs are owned by multiple entities,” he explains. “There’s the label side, there’s the publishing side, there can be multiple composers or writers on a song. It’s a lengthy process […] and requires a lot of expense and agreement.”
Cooper agrees that the process is convoluted, “particularly on the music publishing side, where the publishing rights are, more often than not, fragmented amongst any number of distributors.”
He notes that any party involved could block the entire process. “I could own 1% of the publishing rights of a song, and unless I go along with a deal, I can stop that song from being used anywhere.”
All in all, it’s a “super complex, highly lawyered” operation, he says, and one in which games companies often question the value that’s being added by licensed music.
“Music overvalues what they think they’re bringing to gaming, and gaming undervalues what music can do for them, and so they’re the proverbial ships passing in the night,” Cooper concludes.
But he thinks that if the process can be opened up, there’s huge potential for the use of licensed music in games. “When people have an opportunity to weave the music they want into games in the way they want it, it enhances […] the user experience, and we’ve got data that shows it extends session length. It enhances retention.”
He sees a particular opportunity for online games focused on user-generated content (UGC), whereby in a similar way to Spotify, users could choose the songs they want to match with their creations, or to listen to while they play with friends.
“For the games creators, for the platforms business, and on the music side, it will open up a listening sector that eventually will be a critical sector by way of discovery of new music,” says Cooper.
It could also be an incredibly valuable source of data for the music industry, giving them insights into how artists are being received and how music is being discovered. “In virtually any business that ends up ultimately interfacing with consumers, particularly in entertainment, that data is the 21st century gold.”
How does Styngr work?
Tarrand describes himself as the platform and tools guy. “I just build tech stuff,” he says, having previously worked on things like mobile game advertising platforms. Meanwhile, the other co-founder of Styngr, VY Esports’ Oleg Butenko, “comes out of the world of music and gaming,” Tarrand says.
The pair had worked together on a prior project, Tarrand explains, and “all the while, we had been talking internally about the world of music and gaming and why they don’t meet, and why the two don’t interface with one another.”
The conclusion was that there wasn’t a technical interface between them. “You interface with other industries through technology,” says Tarrand. “You interface with them through SDKs [software development kits] or APIs [application programming interfaces].
“This is how you deal with analytic firms. This is how you deal with the entirety of the advertising industry and the programmatic industry. You deal with them through tech.”
Hence Styngr has built technology that slots into video games and directly connects the music and game industries. “The front end is made to meet developers where they’re at and socket into their technology however they want to do it,” explains Tarrand.
“We have plug-ins in environments that take 15 minutes to put in. We have SDKs for those that like to have very cleaned-up code libraries. And then we have APIs for people [for whom] the last thing in this universe they want is another SDK inside of their game.”
“We do all the brutally complex stuff”
Alex Tarrand, Styngr
Most importantly, rather than game publishers having to directly negotiate sync licenses with music publishers for individual games and songs, Styngr negotiates blanket deals with both major and indie labels for millions of music tracks, which it then distributes.
“We do all the brutally complex stuff, right?” says Tarrand. “We map the label rights to publishing rights. We do this by geography: we ensure that no matter where a user is, they’re getting the music that they’re authorised to listen to by country – because the rights change in almost every country.
“We do royalty reporting, we do usage reporting. And then that’s data that we expose not only to the rights holders, because they need it to function, but we also expose it to the game devs, so that they can get insights into what their users like.”
In addition, the music streams are eligible for the Billboard charts, which Tarrand says is “very meaningful for the recorded music industry.”
In terms of how the music is used within games, Tarrand explains that there’s a range of options, from an in-game radio station, to users picking individual tracks, to highly tailored selections that are curated by the game developers themselves.
In addition, because the music is handled on the server side, brand new songs from artists can be dropped in almost as soon as they become available.
Practical applications
So, where is Styngr being used? “The biggest call has been in UGC ecosystems, because they’re as much social environments as they are gaming environments,” says Tarrand.
“One of the largest ecosystems we work in today is Roblox. We’ve also done a lot of work on the Java side of Minecraft as well.”
Which leads to the next question – who is paying for this? Is it the user, or the publisher? Tarrand says there are various different models. In one, creators would pay a percentage of their revenue to add music to their creations. Another sees users paying for specific music for emotes.
But Tarrand says the applications go well beyond that. “We have sports titles that map to real-world anthems that they use inside of stadiums,” he says, adding that Styngr is even talking to the people behind fantasy games who “want stuff that’s a little bit more ethereal.”
There’s also the option for free music streams that are subsidised by advertising, which Tarrand thinks will be most applicable to the mobile world.
All in all, Cooper concludes that this new way of connecting the music and games industries could be transformative for both. “It puts the two ships passing in the night on course to actually meet each other and exchange a series of benefits.”
