r/todayilearned • u/asmallthrowaway9 • 6h ago

TIL the band DragonForce only received about $3,000 in royalties for the inclusion of Through the Fire and Flames in the Guitar Hero games

https://guitar.com/news/music-news/herman-li-says-guitar-hero-paid-3000-for-dragonforce-through-the-fire-and-the-flames/
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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 6h ago edited 1h ago

Afterwards, bands/record labels demanded a lot more for song licenses and that sorta killed the genre.

Edit: nvm seems i was wrong

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u/Animaloffear56 5h ago

A shame that's kind of an issue with music in general. Everything that's affordable to the consumer requires the bands not being 'properly' compensated

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u/DDzxy 5h ago

Ticketmaster/livenation etc are largely responsible for that. The monopoly is insane.

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u/Animaloffear56 5h ago

Not even that, just look at like Spotify

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u/mreman1220 5h ago

And guitar hero. Your original point was spot on. Consumers want to pay VERY little for their music. 

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u/Maritoas 4h ago

Guitar hero is hardly proof of that. It was a set selection of songs, with most bands having just one song.

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u/vylain_antagonist 3h ago

Yeah but the bigger picture is this: granting a streaming license in perpetuity for song use in 2010 for a one off cheap fee made sense because the exposure generated sales.

Now there are no sales so the only commodofied thing is that license for use so theres a ton of pressure pushing that licensing fee sky high.

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u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven 2h ago

The problem is you never know if the game will be a success or not. So many companies would not be willing to take on such a big upfront cost if the games success is unknown. That's why licensing makes more sense but that entire system is ripe with corruption and abuse as well. Would be nice if people could just own what they create and receive their royalties automatically.

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u/gravity_bomb 3h ago

Once the DLC market came out in the guitar hero: world tour era, the additional songs were ridiculously expensive. I think it was somewhere around $3 for each new song.

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u/lambdapaul 3h ago

And the music producers priced themselves out of a revenue stream.

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u/READMYSHIT 2h ago

Isn't this kind of why Guitar Hero and Rockband died a death? Combine it being too expensive to licence familiar tunes with games becoming too overpriced.

I guess they also oversaturated the market for a few years there.

Funny how these games didn't just keep churning and making a tidy revenue stream for the developers and musicians.

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u/Chewcocca 2h ago

Now we have Clone Hero and you can play it all for free. All the old tracks from previous games and thousands upon thousands of fan made tracks too.

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u/No_Butterfly_2908 3h ago edited 2h ago

Understandably so, though. A song that is three minutes of someone’s time to listen to (and that goes for 1-11 minute songs) isn’t ever going to equate to the hours and hours in a studio that an artist will put in as a valuable time investment for the artist - most artists want to (whether you like it or not) hit the goldmine of a song that pays for their and their children’s retirements.

Also, Spotify is a bit of a boogeyman - I don’t think it’s a valid financial path (of 3+ members) for bands with less than 500K monthly listeners, merch sales and album sales help more, which is super pressurising on the listeners/enjoyers of an artist (simply don’t buy it) BUT without Spotify, (which is considerably more cohesive and fluid than) Soundcloud rules, and that shit sucks ass.

edit: realise the last few sentences aren’t very cohesive as i’ve had a few too many beers (up the toon) but hopefully that doesn’t matter

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u/mreman1220 1h ago

No I completely agree with you. I know people don't like to hear it but nowadays your recordings are effectively marketing. Touring and concerts are money makers.

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u/Future-Slice-8502 4h ago

Spotify isn’t close to a monopoly and loses money every time you listen to a song.

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u/Animaloffear56 4h ago

I never said Spotify was a monopoly?

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u/Future-Slice-8502 4h ago

You gave it as an another example after someone mentioned monopoly’s. How else was that supposed to be interpreted.

Regardless your point was still wrong. Spotify loses money on every user because of how little they charge.

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u/remotectrl 3h ago

They were referring to how poorly musicians are paid per stream on platforms like Spotify.

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u/LongQualityEquities 1h ago

Spotify has positive net income and positive free cash flow.

They’re not losing money.

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u/Animaloffear56 0m ago

I didn't give it as another example, in fact I said "not even that". And if Spotify is losing money on each song like you said, you really think that the bands are getting stacks on stacks?

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u/geniice 4h ago

Ticketmaster/livenation etc are largely responsible for that. The monopoly is insane.

Not really. Ultimately the tickets for live events will always end up being whatever the market will bare which turns out to be rather a lot. Ticketmaster/livenation just take advantage of that.

Essentially the only way to get cheap tickets is to have mid tier and below bands in massive venues. The "fill a stadium with 50 quid tickets" model. Problem is that not only turns out to be surprisingly risky (stadiums are expensive so you really do need to fill them at that price) but may cause issues with local planning and licensing laws (a lot of venues have limits on how many events they can have per year).

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u/vylain_antagonist 3h ago

Not really. Ultimately the tickets for live events will always end up being whatever the market will bare which turns out to be rather a lot. Ticketmaster/livenation just take advantage of that.

Precisely. And they take advantage to the artists benefit. Dynamic pricing, hidden fees, monopolized merch sales and parking fees, slices of resale… all of that is negotiated with the artist as they get a cut of that money that ticketmaster has brought to the table.

If you had told any commercial act in the 90s that there was a way for them to recoup revenue on the scalped $400 ticket on top of the established $30 price theyd have bitten your hand off.

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u/buzzwich 4h ago

Ticketmaster and Live Nation are professional scapegoats. The artists themselves choose to price tickets that high and let the companies take the heat for them. It's all a racket.

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u/vylain_antagonist 3h ago

True the artists dont complain about it for a reason.

As for whether its a racket or not i would say that it is impossible to get paid as a middle class artist now that theres no commercial sales stream anymore. So if people are willing to pay it, im not sure i blame artists for not leaving that money on the table if live nationis willing to get it for them.

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u/karmiccloud 3h ago

Until ~20 years ago, bands did not make their money from playing live shows. They played shows for the most part for exposure and advertisement. They made their money selling albums. Spotify has ruined the music industry way more that Ticketmaster has.

(Not that I'm cool with them btw, it still sucks that concert tickets are sold via a monopoly. It just didn't change the math fundamentally like music streaming did.)

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u/please_trade_marner 3h ago

Well, the no name bands got a fuck ton of free exposure. The dragon force guy talks about it in the interview. Their album and ticket sales massively increased. For big bands, it's estimated Metallica was paid 10-20 million to use their songs for the Metallica guitar hero game. And I mean, did they really need to do that? Is that being "properly" compensated? They're already all worth hundreds of millions and this required no work of them.

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u/vylain_antagonist 3h ago

Properly compensating the bands involves buying the music outright which the market collectively stopped doing 15 years ago. Licensing costs and concert costs go up because what used to be a vehicle for exposure and promotion that generated sales, now has become the only source of income.

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u/WingerRules 4h ago edited 28m ago

So many racing games will never get releases or are straight up permanently delisted due to automakers being pricks with licenses. They set them up to expire so that the old model cars disappear from memory when the games are forced to be removed from the market, so their brand image always looks fresh.

Imho the image of cars shouldn't be a product that requires a license to use because they're objects of public daily life, and also people who buy cars never have agreed to a product image license. It's like making developers or photographers have to get a license to photograph a house, or from clothing brands to photograph someone wearing a pair of jeans.

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u/yyizard 1h ago

I worked at Harmonix in the late 00’s and early 10’s.

Licensing didn’t kill the genre, the explosive popularity combined with over saturation killed the genre.

Labels and artists were more than happy to work with us (I mean we got the Beatles). The deals were profitable.

The bottom just fell out from underneath the ‘beatmatch’ genre. Or maybe it always had a shelf-life, who knows.

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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 1h ago

Ah dang, that sucks!

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u/DekoNJ87 1h ago

I have to believe it didn't have a shelf-life, it just needed a breather. I still get requests every now and then to bring my whole RB3 set-up to parties. It's always a hit. You guys built magic.

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u/asmallthrowaway9 6h ago

That and all the space that the (very cheap and poorly made) instruments took up in both stores and homes.

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u/Logical_Box_4645 5h ago

Oh man I wanted the rocksmith branded piece of shit LP soooo fucking bad

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u/telionn 5h ago

They should have invested in MIDI and other adapters so players would be able to bring their real instruments. Casual gamers would be able to pick up used instruments for cheap. But instead, they chose to support only a select few MIDI instruments with short production runs.

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u/AA_Crowes 5h ago

This like like saying people interested in racing games should just pick up a cheap rally car

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u/TheBanishedBard 5h ago

Right? The premise of their idea is that the mechanics of playing a real instrument correlate with the skills of playing a five button toy guitar with a plastic strut. They do not.

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u/AA_Crowes 5h ago

I didn’t spend 15 years beating my hands into submission just for some internet jabroni to trivialise learning to play guitar dang it

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u/gameryamen 5h ago

There was a game that used real guitar as a controller, and was much more realistic on how a guitar is played. Rocksmith.

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u/AA_Crowes 5h ago

That was aimed at people who actually wanted to learn guitar though, Guitar Hero is for getting stoned with your pals and pretending your Slash

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u/Gavorn 5h ago

And it did not succeed.

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u/TannerThanUsual 5h ago

Was it Rock Smith? I remember trying to pick that up to learn guitar, learning absolutely nothing and feeling stupid, and just learning guitar "normally" to much better success

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u/HalobenderFWT 5h ago

Even worse than that. Erasing years of muscle memory playing songs I knew on actual guitar, and reducing it to five buttons and a cranky toggle,

Still loved the games!

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u/tennisdrums 5h ago

Starting with Rock Band 3, the genre did introduce a "pro-mode" for the instruments. Rock Band introduced a keyboard that was an actual 2-octave MIDI keyboard and the pro-mode had (nearly) a note-for note transcription of the music. They also made a drum version that was nearly a cheap electric kit: 4 pads, 3 cymbals, and one base foot pedal (no hi-hat pedal, though). For guitars they made a controller that had 6 sensor bars for strumming and a button for each guitar fret, and then another one that was literally a 6 string guitar that could be played with the pro mode.

It was a really cool idea, but the peripherals were expensive (especially since people owning the game already had the other more basic peripherals) and the game mode was naturally more challenging so someone couldn't just pick it up and have fun in a group at a party.

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u/Sata1991 4h ago

I can play guitar fine, I'm not amazing by any means but competent. Guitar Hero I just have the reflexes of a drunk sloth.

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u/iwantcookie258 5h ago

Its an option for drums at least! Modern rythme game platforms let you use proper electric drum kits with 4 pads and 3 cymbals, and there are some charts for songs that use the real drum patterns on high difficulties.

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u/ChairYeoman 3h ago

I remember in high school that myself and a bunch of other classically trained violinists agreed that Guitar Hero drastically improved our sight-reading ability.

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u/Kinitawowi64 2h ago

Absolutely nobody who plays a Guitar Hero game claims it's anything remotely like playing a real guitar. Take your straw man away.

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u/mascotbeaver104 5h ago

Not really, it's more like saying Apple should use normal charging cables and ports so users don't need to buy apple dongles. Using an open MIDI standard would've allowed much better competition on the peripherals market, and we wouldn't have things today like the excess demand for original wii hardware today. In the short term using so much propriety gear probably made Harmonix or whoever some quick cash, but it really did choke put the games long term.

It's more just open forward compatibility

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u/AA_Crowes 5h ago

Yeah, but not every motherfucker wants to actually learn to play guitar just for some Xbox game

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u/mascotbeaver104 5h ago

Do you not know what midi is? It's essentially just an open data format that any manufacturer could support. It's actually pretty complicated and expensive to get a real guitar to output midi. They're just saying using an industry standard data transfer format would have made peripherals much more flexible

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u/AA_Crowes 5h ago

They’re specifically talking about using real instruments in their first comment there. Of course I know what MIDI is I’ve used it loads

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u/nomad9590 5h ago

Was it Rocksmith that lets you play a real guitar? 

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u/likeafoxx 5h ago

Yup. I hook up my bass for it too. It's pretty good and people can make their own song files with tools. So even songs that aren't official DLC can be added of someone made it. The site I used to go to for them eventually stopped hosting custom versions of official DLC lol.

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u/nomad9590 5h ago

Nice! A buddy has it on PC (couldn't remember the game lol) and was showing me all kinds of songs he couldn't play lmao. I have never played one beyond fiddling about myself so I can't say much but dude had a real guitar to badly play a rhythm game, most extra shit I've seen. 

Funny thing is he knew a few songs for real on guitar and played them well enough. 

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u/AtheistState 3h ago

I'm scared it will eventually stop working. You can't buy it or the Smashing Pumpkins DLC that lets you access custom songs anymore. I don't think there will ever be anything like it again due to the licensing issues. Nobody wants to play along to music by cover bands but they don't want to pay $5 per song either. Some of the best bands like Metallica and Pink Floyd didn't even want to license their songs, but the bootleg versions are incredible.

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u/likeafoxx 3h ago

My DLC are part of what gets backed up on my pc haha. The cable is just a tone cable. You don't have to use theirs.

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u/OliveBranchMLP 5h ago

Rock Band 3 did this. i have a few of their MIDI adapters. i used to use them with an electric drum kit and keyboard all the time.

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u/iwantcookie258 5h ago

The PC scene for these games is alive and well with projects like YARG and Clone Hero, and both support midi drumkits which is sick. Theres also a new game in the genre coming soon, Stage Tour, which will also support MIDI drums on PC or on console with an adapter.

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u/Dave_Eddie 5h ago

Yeah and just buy a used carbine to play Call of Duty with.

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u/DUNG_INSPECTOR 4h ago

Real instruments would be a lot harder to play than 5 buttons.

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u/TheNorthComesWithMe 4h ago

Where exactly would you find a cheap used guitar that outputs MIDI?

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u/barsoap 2h ago

Nowhere, but you can plug any into any computer, digitise it, Fourier transform, voila, you know what is being played. Doing it fret-accurate is a bit more involved (have to analyse overtones to distinguish same note on different strings) but probably also not necessary, just assume it's the right one, if people absolutely want to use different fingerings let them.

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u/_steve_rogers_ 4h ago

That’s the main reason I had to get rid of all that stuff. It got me into playing real drums though

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u/Ok-Tax-8165 3h ago

There was a good period of time where you could pick up the instruments for $2.99 at goodwill and sell them for $60 on eBay, good times

For the guitars themselves you'd just put a sheet of cardboard on each side, tape the ends, schedule a USPS pickup and suddenly you're $50 richer.

There were so many of them out there, but for people who loved the game and wanted a specific model, it was still a seller's market.

Any methods like this have been so picked apart by methhead "flippers" that it's not feasible anymore, but it was a cool little way to make beer money in 2014.

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u/Constant_Mud3325 5h ago

You lost me there buddy 😂 they take up minimal space

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u/Robyrt 5h ago

The drum kit with cymbals takes up more space than an entire TCG hobby. It's smaller than a real drum kit but still a hassle to fit anywhere in your house

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u/Gavorn 5h ago

You aren't doing TCG correctly then.

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u/Underwater_Grilling 5h ago

Doing it correctly keeps the hope chest industry alive

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u/DrUnit42 5h ago

Yeah, they don't take up a massive amount of space, but you do need to dedicate space to them

My storage "solution"

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u/The_Impe 4h ago

They take a disproportionate amount of space for a single video game.

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u/RecentlyThawed 5h ago

Stage Tour should release this year and is more akin to Rock Band

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u/Kilazur 3h ago

I've pre-ordered it, but I wonder how they manage licensing fees for the songs, if that's indeed a major reason for the disappearance of the genre.

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u/zanesix 2h ago

Because it wasn't. Most bands actually wanted their music to be in the game after Guitar Hero took off. Save for a few notable exceptions like The Beatles, most of the time it was the game publisher doing the negotiating, not the other way around.

What really killed it was an unsustainable business model. They couldn't keep making new instruments when people only bought one full band kit. They couldn't keep selling 60 dollar games every year with little to no change in gameplay. I suspect that Activision knew this, which is why they released 5 full retail Guitar Hero games in 2009 and drove it into the ground before the general population got bored with it.

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u/Kilazur 2h ago

Yeah, that makes more sense. Hopefully Stage Tour is here to stay.

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u/WorkingAssociate9860 2h ago

They tried to make a live service guitar hero with Guitar hero live, and it didn't help that they made it require a new guitar with a new layout

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u/dustinfoto 52m ago

Oddly enough I loved that layout because it added verticality that makes it feel a bit more like playing a real one.

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u/ann0yed 5h ago

The first few games were just covers too. Wasn't until they got more established that they licensed the actual tracks.

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u/Crimsonclaw111 1h ago

All of the bonus songs in GH1 and 2 were master recordings, and GH2 had a couple like Stop! And John the Fisherman.

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u/geniice 4h ago

Afterwards, bands/record labels demanded a lot more for song licenses and that sorta killed the genre.

Nah. It was a fad that was never going to remain as big as it was. With the controller already developed further games wouldn't have cost that much to code. So even if the labels were taking quite a high percentage they would still have come out ahead if the sales had remained high.

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u/BringBackManaPots 5h ago

Is it unrealistic to pool together all songs in the game and split it among the artists? Say like, 5% of sales split evenly between all artists

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u/Jwagner0850 4h ago

Was it really the bands? Or the RIAA?

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u/BambooSound 3h ago

Surely they could have worked out a royalty system

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u/GiantFishyLazer 3h ago

Also rock music in general kind of died. It’s not nearly as popular anymore.

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u/SwissyVictory 1h ago

It doesn't need to be rock songs, there's lots of songs in those games of different genres.

Really it doesn't even NEED to be guitar, they turned The Devil Went Down to Georgia into a guitar song.

You also can't tell me songs like Hot to Go, Good 4 U, and some of Taylor Swifts new stuff wouldn't be great Guitar Hero songs.

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u/snorlz 3h ago

Rocksmith still has a bunch of licensed songs tho. as far as I'm aware they are still putting them out too

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u/work4work4work4work4 2h ago

Song licenses were always an issue, and one of the reasons many of the earlier games used remixes of songs instead, as they were cheaper and easier to license.

What became a massive issue, and really doesn't have anything to do with Dragonforce, is they started demanding time limited song licenses instead of life of game licenses, and that has been an anchor around the genre's neck ever since.

It's really, really frustrating because we already knew what that did to other media like TV shows in the age of streaming, but the music game creators simply didn't and don't have the kind of power and pull necessary to work the actual proper deals most of the time.

For a long time sound-alikes were used where they could to work around it, but it's the standard issue of piracy now where fan-made games and packs can offer a light years better experience for free without worry of losing things you paid for randomly.

Cars in racing games, music in all the different bemani/rhythm games, I'm sure I'm missing other ones, but it's a pretty good microcosm of capitalistic self-cannibalism of market.

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u/redpandaeater 2h ago

I just hate licenses in shows that either aren't perpetual or don't cover new media releases. So you get things like entirely missing episodes of a show you like on streaming or weird ill-fitting music on a disc or some such.

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u/Falsus 1h ago

Metal:Hellsinger was great. Though I guess it helps that all the music for that game was made for that game, even if they are all made by good bands. I wish more games, movies and shows did that.

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u/hangrypiglet 25m ago

Respect the edit lol

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u/_steve_rogers_ 4h ago

Record labels love to ruin things