Disruptors and curious minds!
If you make music, video games or just want to know how the biggest IP and games create their in-game music and virtual bands, this episode is for you. Yep, get your joypads out and hit start! We're talking about virtual bands (Pentkakill and K/DA) and the future of video game music from League of legends and former head of music at Riot Games, Toa Dunn.
🎮How do game companies like Riot Games think, build and execute their music strategy for games? How did League of Legends give you virtual bands like Pentakill and K/DA... and more importantly, why did they do it?
🎮 From Music, development, distribution and A&R, to marketing, storytelling. In-house musicians, DJs, bands, video games are the perfect example of interdisciplinary teams. And it is a complex and fine edge to get the balance and trust right, to get the strategy right. Without it there is no Pentakill, no e-sports, no Fortnite.
🎸 For over a decade, Toa managed the music strategy and developed a new core business model around music experiences at Riot Games, helping to take league of legends - and the virtual bands created from characters in game - to 200 million monthly players.
Now he is taking that vast well of experience and focusing on generating meaningful impact across entertainment and technology as a music and gaming strategist.
Please Enjoy The Show.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Disruptors and curious minds
0:36 The Book Club
1:29 Tech V Music
2:09 Our Sponsors Wripple
2:36 Who Is Toa Dunn?
4:15 Music Strategy For Riot Games
8:19 Hiring The Right Music Partners At League Of Legends
10:23 Creating A Virtual Band Starts With Understanding Your Players
12:23 Decision Matrix: New Songs or Back Catalogues?
13:53 How The Virtual Band Pentakill Came To Be
19:39 Building Teams At Riot Games
25:05 Building The Virtual Band K/DA
27:46 Building Trust Between Teams
33:58 How Music Is Shaping Video Games
39:25 The Future of Video Game Music
45:14 Old Men V The Next Generation
49:25 Jazz Lessons And Improvisation
52:02 Final Thoughts
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Quotes from the show
“For more narrative driven games music can have more of an upfront kind of role in that experience. So the #musicstrategy can be quite different.”
“We started off kind of trying to figure out what music's role could be in League of Legends.”
“I approached it from the lens of how music could add to the experience.”
“We had reached out to The Crystal Method and ended up producing a song to help launch and release this new character Lucian.”
“I used to be nervous because you never know if the players are actually going to like what you're about to deliver until they get it in their hands and they play.”
“Our first band was #Pentakill, a heavy metal band.”
“We treated them like a real band and that was kind of an Experiment. But it resonated really well with our players.”
“K/DA did not exist, there were many characters to select from so we went through this creative and strategic process to figure out the roles (and characters) of this band.”
“People had a connection to these characters in League of Legends; we couldn't just take a character and totally transform them.”
“The creative process is really trying to figure out who the right characters are, what their stories are and how they work together.”
“They would make this joke that Riot Games is a music company that happened to make a great game.”
“You have to make sure that change is communicated across teams so they know to change it in their pipeline as well.”
“There's a lot of complexity in interdisciplinary teams.”
“I remember SSX tricky in particular and just like how involved the music was with that experience.”
“New technology is enabling new things to happen and music has this really interesting way of being at the cusp of it.”
“Jazz? What it did for me was it opened the door of improvisation.”
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Jeremy is a futurist, writer, and nexus thinker working at the intersection of technology, entertainment and brand. He is the co-founder of Tunewelders and SoundObjects and creator of the Write To Know You program.
Mark is a creative writer, futurist thinker and trainee Nexus thinker. He writes, researches and thinks about web3 and emerging technology for LVMH and Culture3.
Links To The Show:
Join the book club - www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/bookclub
Connect With Mark - linktr.ee/markfielding
Connect With Jeremy - www.jeremygilbertson.com/
#videogamestrategy #emergingtechnology #videogamemusic #riotgames #leagueoflegends