By Stacey Horricks, Music Supervisor, MassiveMusic New York.

Front page photo: (L-R): Music attorney Steven Masur, MTV's Paul DeGooyer, BMG Chrysalis' Ed Razzano and MassiveMusic's Stacey Horricks. An audio recording of this NARIP program is available, click here.

1. The majority of video games do not pay performance royalties (Rock Band, Guitar Hero and other music games are the exception).
2. Hard Rock and Electronic are still the most popular music genres when it comes to licensing.
3. All the major game developers have in-house music supervisors. Music supervision is rarely outsourced in gaming.
4. Jose Gonzalez's "Far Away" just won Best Song at Spike TV's "Video Game Awards" for its featured appearance in Rockstar's “Red Dead Redemption.”
5. As of February 24th, Island Def Jam has opened its catalog to Music App developers. Developers will be able to use their music for free and IDJ will keep the publishing rights to whatever the developer comes up with.

5 Additional Tidbits On Video Games:

1. Gamasutra and GameIndustry. Biz are two of the top Web sites when it comes to knowing more about the business side of video games.
2. The 2nd most highly valued company in the video game industry today is only 4 years old: Zynga, makers of FarmVille.
3. 2011 is predicted to be the year of mobile social games (playing Facebook-style games on your mobile phone).
4. The average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman!
5. Google TV recently announced at GDC (Game Developers Conference) that android phones will act as a controller when playing games on their TV.

Editor's Note:

NARIP will produce another Music in Games program to take place on April 13 in San Francisco with top executives from Sony Playstation and others (details here), and in other NARIP chapter cities.

Thank you to SoundCTRL's Walt Ribeiro for his excellent review of our Music In Games program in New York. Audio of the NARIP's New York Music In Games program is available here now for download.

Game Developers Conference Archive