[Guest post] Music and games: A catalytic combination given the right conditions

[Georgia Jenkins]

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[Guest post] Music and games: A catalytic combination given the right conditions

 Georgia Jenkins Monday, July 27, 2026 - academic research, Chloe Lake-Jones, copyright licensing, games, Guest post, music licensing

The IPKat has received and is pleased to host this guest contribution from Katfriend Chloe Lake-Jones (University of Liverpool, MusicFutures), who reports on the MusicFutures Roundtable for the Harmony project, funded by the UK Intellectual Property Office, which explores the convergence of music and games. Here is what Chloe writes:

The music and games industries present a site ripe for significant collaboration given their shared enrichment and escapism intentions as multimedia experiences. As growth hotspots, both have become frontier industries within the UK and global creative industries, building significant discourse, funding and global engagement. While developing simultaneously throughout the digitalisation era, gaming has had an observable mainstream boom, as its popularity and market size continues to peak. We are a long way from CD-ROMs now.

Playing is now a highly interactive and dynamic experience that requires extensive assets of music to soundscape visual activity. While audio was once an accompaniment, it now hugely enhances the sophisticated audiovisual experience of immersive gaming. Music usage includes main themes, procedural contexts and narratives, which are designed to be linear, or adaptive to in-game activity. Here, music comprises original compositions, and music synchronisation of popular tracks through licensing. On average, five times the amount of music is required for one game compared to one film. In a game ‘dreamworld’, this process could reap significant rewards for both industries.

However, in reality, licensing is the site of a legal and operational battle, as it was previously described on this blog too: it is a ‘pixelated realm of intellectual property rights’. The growing convergence of music and games challenges the application of licensing frameworks developed for linear, placement-based sync, to more complex and dynamic uses of music in interactive and innovative environments. Game player level ‘advanced’ is officially activated.

Photo by Peter Lam CH on Unsplash

The Harmony project aims to address these very issues by bringing both industries together through a series of events, including a roundtable held in April 2026. In parallel, there are two open surveys for the music industry and gaming industry to identify factors affecting the reconciliation of both industries. This will shape an industry Hackathon to stress-test the recommendations published in a forthcoming report authored with the UK IPO on facilitating the licensing of music in games.

The April roundtable

The roundtable focused on the fragmentation of music licensing in games from an industry perspective and was led by Dr Sabine Jacques and Dr Rachael Drury (University of Liverpool). The event was organized ahead of the 2026 Sound City Plus conference event ‘Sync or Swim’, which publicly profiled conversations of the same nature. Twenty-eight delegates were invited to share their insights, experiences and research, reflective of stakeholders involved in licensing music for games. This included prominent Liverpool City Region creators, global game companies, major record labels, collective management organisations and intellectual property lawyers.

The two-hour discussion began by mapping shared experiences: what each party seeks from a music-game relationship and where negotiations most commonly break down. Naturally, this proceeded to proposed solutions to minimise legal and cultural friction points, and to consider the conditions for collaboration to more consistently deliver creative and commercial potential. The roundtable revealed that the radical extension of the lifespan and reach of games, due to their online and downloadable capabilities, exacerbates issues related to the territorial nature of copyright and lacking equitable remuneration online.

Key takeaways

The legal complexity begins with the rights themselves. Under UK copyright law, music in games engages both the copyright in the musical work and the sound recording. This means that developers must secure licences for both works which requires clearance of publishing and exclusive master rights. When music is used online, streamed, updated, or imbedded in a live-service environment, additional questions arise around the right of communication to the public and its scope for exploitation.

For interactive games, these issues are compounded by the need for flexibility. For example, a fixed sync model, developed for linear audiovisual content, does not always map neatly onto those uses. Innovation within the gaming industry means that online performing rights and thorough synchronisation licenses must be cleared at scale, often at a high volume, and tend to occur late in the game making process. This challenges the ability to source, attribute and ascertain relevant copyright interests. Even further, parallel separate negotiations with multiple stakeholders, whom have different commercial expectations and views on scope, duration, territory and adaptation, frustrate this process. The roundtable affirmed this disconnected experience across all stakeholders in the current creative and licensing process: poorly remunerated songwriters, tail-chasing indie and AAA game developers, confused IP lawyers, pressurised music publishers, frustrated CMOs, opportunity costed labels and audiences who substitute game music for their own playlist. The lived reality of literacy gaps and cultural practice oversights has created a counteractive ecosystem.

When it came to solutions, the group echoed that royalty free music and avoiding society affiliated composers are undesirable alternatives, which risk bottlenecking culture and detracting from game-music’s progression. Ultimately, it was agreed that greater flexibility is required to accurately represent the kinds of rights required by this community and maximise opportunity. All delegates confirmed that a more substantive and informative framework, devised with synergy in mind, is needed. One even remarked that to ‘address chronic issues, greater middlemen who bridge both industries are required’ . The group reflected that it is essential to overcome the current makeup of actors and to remove reliance on the legal industry to translate between both industries. A cohort of productive solutions were discussed, including pools of licensed music, a catalogue of successful and unsuccessful stories, and an “off the shelf” licensing tool. Overall, two main catalysts were identified to overcome structural and cultural issues:

1. Design regular networking opportunities between industries to encourage connectivity

2. Create a top-down ‘map of rights’ education piece to reduce granularity

Future steps

Facilitating ongoing cross-fertilisation will encourage the spread of colloquial industry conventions and jargon, ensuring all levels of the creative industries understand each other. This is necessary to inspire generational changemaking in light of modern game development.

While finding a solution can be likened to the level of confusion of wearing a VR headset for the first time, this event marked a step-ball change in the shared attitude of optimism to tackling what the industries present, now and in the future, together. In time, widening participation as such will only serve to benefit the creative ecosystem and foster catalytic conditions for meaningful growth.

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