Video game composers largely miss out on the performance royalties that film and TV composers collect, according to speakers on a panel about game music rights. They urged composers to register their works, understand how royalties are collected and plan beyond one-off buyouts.
Materia Music CEO Sebastian Wolff moderated the session. The lineup spanned much of the royalty chain: a publisher, a PRO (performance rights organization), a record label and a global publishing administrator.
Planning in decades
Wolff opened by telling the room: “Make sure that you’re planning in decades and really maximizing the value of your music, maybe even beyond the buyout.”
He also gauged the audience’s familiarity with music rights. After asking who was affiliated with a PRO, he said a similar panel a decade earlier drew “a lot of question marks from the audience,” and called the change “so good to see.”
But when he asked who had ever been paid by Harry Fox, SoundExchange or the MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective), his assessment was blunt: “there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Two copyrights and a fragmented collection system
Every recording carries two copyrights: a composition copyright, managed by publishers, and a master copyright, managed by labels. Most composers, the panel suggested, are aware of only one income source.
Hegarty described how the streaming era changed mechanical royalties, with DSPs (digital service providers) now paying the MLC rather than labels. Eames added that the MLC covers only the US, so royalties generated abroad must be collected separately.
Stephens said streaming turned “a river of nickels” into “billions of micro-pennies.” PROs license music wherever it is heard, from streaming services to the bar down the street. “Anywhere where your music is heard publicly is a performance right,” he said.
Foreign income and registration gaps
Money earned abroad depends on reciprocal agreements between collection societies. Some societies are well run, while others are government run, and part of the earnings can go to local cultural funds before reaching the composer’s home PRO.
Transparency is a recurring problem. “As far as what source was paid for what writer from what project, there’s a lot of difficulty that we’re dealing with there,” Stephens said.
Eames said the system waits for money to arrive instead of looking for it. “The reciprocal agreement framework and network is more reactionary than pro-action,” he said. With roughly 140 collection societies worldwide, each running its own database, unregistered works can go unpaid.
He said studios will not close that gap: “[studios] exist to sell video games. They’re not there to collect money from music royalties.” For composers who do not control their rights, his advice was: “you have to become your own policeman, or money’s being left on the table.”
Eames also pointed to a growing income stream for game composers. Orchestral video game concerts tour constantly, and registered works can earn local performance royalties from those shows.
The case for monetizing game music publishing
McNellis made what the panel treated as its central argument, calling game music publishing “the single largest unmonetized asset in the history of the entertainment business.” He compared it to “having a Ferrari on blocks in the garage. You can rev it up, but it ain’t leaving the garage.”
He framed it as an artist-rights issue, saying “your peers that are working in linear media are buying houses in Malibu.” He has since come to see it as a larger business problem.
His argument rests on how the services work. Streaming a show on Netflix and streaming a game from Xbox, PlayStation or Steam function the same way. “You pay a subscription, it streams from a server, it lands at your house, and you determine what you’re watching,” he said.
Yet film and TV composers earn performance royalties and game composers largely do not. McNellis noted that the UK’s PRS has made progress under a rule that treats a download as a broadcast, while in the US a stream already counts as one.
He said the stakes extend beyond composers. “The video game industry is sitting on a mountain of gold and they’re throwing dirt on top of it,” he said. On the gap in payouts, he added: “Whatever the number is for linear media, that number for video games is a .00 decimal.”
McNellis said that once game music publishing is treated as an asset class, it can be borrowed against, leveraged, sold and monetized, and the proceeds can go into gaming budgets. He said the effort is not adversarial: “This isn’t composers versus publishers. This isn’t composers versus developers. It’s not an us versus them problem.”
The Fallout example
Eames recalled that composer Inon Zur came to him with seven hours of music from a Fallout expansion. “He dumped a huge hard drive in my lap and I have seven hours of music and 123 individual pieces of music that I registered at BMI,” Eames said.
His advice for work-for-hire composers is to write registration into the deal. “There is a contractual legal obligation that all of that music has to get properly registered in all of the places in which it needs to be registered,” he said. His rule: if a song is not registered, “you won’t get paid. End of story.”
The panel used Fallout to illustrate the gap between television and games. BMI composer Ramin Djawadi collects performance royalties when the Fallout series streams on Amazon. Zur, who scored the games, likely does not see comparable income from the series.
Licensing progress at the PROs
Stephens described licensing developments from BMI’s side:
- Sony struck a deal with PRS in the UK around 2018 that was “essentially paying writers and publishers royalties on these video games.”
- Twitch has been simpler to license, he said, because the data it collects makes it easy to see who should be paid.
