How do rhythm games manage song licensing and copyrights?

Hi, as I'm making a commercial VR rhythm game, I got a bit greedy and dreamed about putting songs from well-known artists in my game. Turns out, licensing a song for commercial use costs more than a fortune! I've seen some games out there like Audioshield and Holodance using tunes from known artists, so my question is...how do they do it? Are there any smart ways for an indie developer to bring commercial songs into the game?

 

I vaguely recall reading something like a post mortem from the maker of Robot Unicorn Attack re: being surprised how easy it was to license Erasure's Always via their publisher. Something like that has obviously renewed interest in the song, so it'd be about having something you can demonstrate or a publisher backing you and using songs where the artist or label also sees potential benefit from the use as much as any direct payment... I imagine

 

They contact the publisher, work out a deal, and pay for it.

 

I'm not sure it's always that simple because license management institutions like the German GEMA can be really tricky to deal with and are not at all prepared to dealing with games yet. There are plenty of youtube videos I can't watch in Germany, because they contain music from artists that have contracts with the GEMA to handle licensing for them. The artists can't get around those GEMA licensing terms themselves in any way. Like if you are a composer represented by the GEMA and have your own music on your website in a player, you need to report those plays to the GEMA, pay the license fee, and then you get your percentage of the whole deal back. It's bonkers, I don't ever wanna deal with them. I have no idea how the big rythm game franchises made it possible, but I doubt it was easy.
I know a composer who has a contract with the GEMA and he can't compose music for games because he can't have music under his name that isn't managed by the GEMA license-wise and they didn't have any kind of licensing that was compatible with games the last time we talked about it (a few years back).
In other countries you might have other institutions to worry about.

 

In Holodance, we have native songs which come with the game. Those are either done by freelancer musicians, so in those cases, we own all rights and there is no hassle with labels, publishers and institutions like GEMA ... or, as is the case with 5 songs currently not even in the game (yet ;-) ), we licensed them through Bonzai Progressive (which is a rather awesome label). The song in Level 6 is different: It was a song that a friend of one of our players had created, and then we licensed it directly from him. In a music game like Holodance, for the native songs, the trickier part was getting the files we needed, and building high-quality beatmaps with awesome gameplay.

One funny anecdote is that we actually wanted to get Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (Dirtyphonics Remix) by Skrillex for Level 10 (because, well, it would simply be the perfect song for that level). That did not work out at all. The publisher was super-cool - but the label never even answered to our requests.

So ... sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's a bit of a challenge ... sometimes it's kind of ridiculous.

The other kind of music you can play in Holodance is Free Mode. In that case, the music is not included in Holodance. Same with Audioshield and many other rhythm games.

 

Bonzai label .. that sure goes way back. Your VR rhythm game looks pretty great.

 

The reason for this was that Google refused to pay what the GEMA wanted (0.375 cent per play). So YouTube (not the GEMA) decided to block the videos in Germany instead. A year ago Google finally signed a contract with the GEMA.