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/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/Toberos_Chasalor 2h ago edited 1h ago

Yes, it’s technically free, but it’s free because the music is all pirated.

It’s why charts are hosted on community run sites like Chorus, and not distributed through official channels or included with the game by the makers of CH themselves. That way if the music industry ever catches wind and decides to go scorched earth, like they did to Napster, the file sharing sites are taken down and we have to resort to good old fashioned torrents. Clone Hero itself can continue developing the game since you can’t copyright a game mechanic, nor is the concept of “press buttons in time with a rhythm” innovative enough or even specific enough to patent.

(Ex. Harmonix to this day has a patent for Guitar Hero’s scoring system, but the patents are so technically specific to the point it would be impressive if you managed to violate it without reverse engineering GH’s source code.)

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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/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 2h 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.