Topics in Recorded Music: Gaming

Catalog description

Fortnite’s concerts with Marshmello and Travis Scott. Open Pit’s DIY music festivals in Minecraft. League of Legends’ K-pop and hip-hop groups. Indie label Monstercat’s deals with Rocket League and Roblox. Sony Music’s gaming imprint Lost Rings. Grand Theft Auto’s 75 billion minutes of in-game music listening. “Fantasy record label” apps like FanLabel that allow fans to assemble their own “brackets” of artists that they think will do best on the charts. These are just a handful of examples of how music and games are increasingly overlapping as industries, experiences and cultures. There are strong mutual incentives at play: Game developers are blooming into full-fledged media brands and are looking to the music business for both financial and cultural capital, while music companies are looking to diversify their revenue, experiment with more interactive technologies and tap into the power of highly engaged communities online. In the process, this merging of entertainment worlds is also rewriting conventional wisdom of what it means to be an artist, a performer, gamer and especially a fan. This course will give students the critical frameworks and vocabulary to dissect how games are being incorporated into every corner of the music industry — from the moment music is created, to the strategies that inform how music is then disseminated, marketed, monetized and performed. We will draw from a combination of theoretical readings and real-world case studies to dissect video games that center music in their player experience on the one hand, and musical projects that draw direct inspiration from games in their approaches to design, marketing, business and fan engagement on the other hand. Because this field is relatively new, many of these case studies may emerge in real time as the course unfolds. This course will be reading-, writing- and play-intensive, with required…