Good on them. $7500 for all future royalties is an absolute rip, especially coming out of Rockstar.
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I love Lemmy, but the general consensus of “fuck big corpo no matter what” attitude is kinda tiring. This is completely reasonable for Rockstar to reject the counter offer. Not to mention, Heaven 17 is not some big band to begin with.
Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
Especially when they’re kind of a 1 hit wonder.
But asking for as much as they did, you’d think their songs were much more popular. They’re no Billy idol, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, etc.
I’m tired of games getting songs removed, so I am actually glad Rockstar and hopefully others are going the route of trying to only get songs that won’t end up having to be removed down the line. Not cool getting an update getting a song removed.
Or a game removed from being purchased entirely because of music licensing issues
Yeah has happened to Alan Wake. Now they decided to just remove the song to hopefully not have to be delisted again.
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
everyone now knows what a money maker this property is so they should be asking for their regular price times ten
TIL that game has a rumored budget of 2 billion.
Sometimes, when I play a AAA game and something expensive is visible on screen (e.g. half of New York getting destroyed during that long quick-time event in Spider-Man), I like to shout “Production value!” at nobody, like that director self-insert kid in “Super 8” (2011).
I get a feeling I would ruin my voice doing this every time in GTA 6.
To answer your question, I think we would have to look at what music licenses usually cost. Some quick googling tells me that $7500 is hardly an outrageously low sum for a song from a middle of the road '80s band. They aren’t exactly Depeche Mode. I think they would have benefited far more from the inclusion of their song in this game financially (since it would cast them into the limelight again, providing streaming revenue and perhaps gain them new fans) than the little and likely very temporary publicity they gained from rejecting the offer.
I’ve never heard of Heaven 17. On GTA V, there are a lot of bands than I had never heard of too. Rockstar introduced me to those bands, their other work, solos from those members, and other artists in those genres.
Frankly, if I was a musician that wasn’t already a huge star, I’d do it for FREE because of the massive GUARANTEED exposure.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Artists die from not getting exposure. This isn’t one of those “play my wedding for exposure” things. It’s being a regular song playing in one of the world’s most popular game franchises.
They should get paid, sure, but telling them to fuck off because the rate wasn’t what they want is dumb.
To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.
But this exposure is short-lived with an incredibly limited audience Who may or may not listen to it. I did not look them up. I don’t have the time right this moment and I will definitely forget.
I just think that in this particular video game franchise, even if they did not receive the amount of money they wanted upfront for royalties, They could not pay for this kind of Marketing opportunity.
But your assumption is that every artist gets the same deal. Some maybe more valuable and expensive than others. Then the question is, if this group was valued very low and that is whats upsetting. But come on, 7500 for lifetime rights is really bad payment. I wonder what the deals with prior games and songs was.
People say Rockstar just “Isn’t a rockstar anymore”
No, this is pretty much how I expect from washed up rockstars who’ve sold out and only care about reliving the glory days. Constantly shouting “Don’t you know who I am?” when anyone gives them any grief.
Do they pay Anthony Burgess for the rights to their band name?
penthouse and pavement is one of the best albums of the 80s
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