Do they pay Anthony Burgess for the rights to their band name?
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
But your assumption is that every artist gets the same deal. Some maybe more valuable and expensive than others. Then the question is, if this group was valued very low and that is whats upsetting. But come on, 7500 for lifetime rights is really bad payment. I wonder what the deals with prior games and songs was.
TIL that game has a rumored budget of 2 billion.
Sometimes, when I play a AAA game and something expensive is visible on screen (e.g. half of New York getting destroyed during that long quick-time event in Spider-Man), I like to shout “Production value!” at nobody, like that director self-insert kid in “Super 8” (2011).
I get a feeling I would ruin my voice doing this every time in GTA 6.
To answer your question, I think we would have to look at what music licenses usually cost. Some quick googling tells me that $7500 is hardly an outrageously low sum for a song from a middle of the road '80s band. They aren’t exactly Depeche Mode. I think they would have benefited far more from the inclusion of their song in this game financially (since it would cast them into the limelight again, providing streaming revenue and perhaps gain them new fans) than the little and likely very temporary publicity they gained from rejecting the offer.
