In the free eBook I recently released on game publishing, I wrote that music is a different animal than most other things because – in part – of the way the copyrights for music work.
Here, I wanted to expand on that a bit.
If a developer or publisher is looking to release an official soundtrack album (OST), there are some nuances to copyrights and rights administration they should understand first.
In the book, I talk about how a game is really a collaborative work bringing together a bunch of different copyrightable individual works (art, programming, written words, etc.). Music is also a collaborative work, in a way, and the law treats it that way.
A song is really made up of a number of parts. Primarily, there are the musical composition and the sound recording. Huh? Copyright exists in works of expression. One work is the composition – the literal written composed music. Another is the recorded performance of that composition. So, for example, a songwriter might write a melody and a saxophonist might play the melody and record it. Each has a separate copyright interest in her own work.
Add to that the lyricist and any rightsholders in any samples and you are looking at a real mess.
The goal for a developer or publisher in putting together the game is to ensure the rights of all stakeholders in the music are either licensed or transferred such that the game can be released without infringement.
For the OST, if they have anything less than a full assignment, they need to consider who has the right to distribute soundtracks. If the musician has a publisher, that publisher may have a say in the process. The musician may also have a rights administrator who specifically handles these kinds of licenses, and “mechanical” license fees may need to be remitted outside of any deal directly with the musician.
Like I said, music is a different animal.
