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Heaven 17 claims it turned down GTA 6 soundtrack offer over pay offer: ‘Go f*** yourself’ [VGC]
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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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?
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.
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.