Video games have been using licensed music in their soundtracks since the 80s. Midway's arcade game Journey featured 8-bit arrangements of the titular band's music, and the hip-hop track Megablast by Bomb the Bass was the title music for Xenon 2 Megablast on the Amiga. As video game hardware evolved throughout the 80s and 90s, the technical limitations that had previously limited the use of music in games started to disappear, and the music industry saw a new opportunity. Today, the relationship between the two industries is mutually beneficial: developers can license popular music to make their games appeal to certain audiences, while musicians benefit from instantaneous exposure to millions of new listeners and usually a lot of money. It's a healthy relationship, but like all relationships it isn't without problems -- and many of the problems associated with music licenses can cause some games to be removed from sale. When developers want to feature music by bands and artists in their game, a licensing deal needs to be made.
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It was planned partly as a celebration of an underground form of music that has traditionally thrived on images of drama and danger, and partly as a response to a subgenre known as National Socialist black metal, which espouses neo-Nazi views and has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as aiming to recruit youth to white-supremacist causes. The organizer of the Black Flags show, Kim Kelly, who, until recently, was a metal editor for Noisey and has written for Pitchfork, Spin , and Rolling Stone , said that, although National Socialist black-metal bands comprise only a small percentage of metal music, they have recently had outsized visibility. And, as far-right movements have grown in the United States and Europe, she said, some metal fans have begun having discussions about politics and expression that mirror those taking place in the broader culture. Is it curtailing their free speech to make it harder for a band to get booked or get signed versus at what point does it become critical to keep these dangerous fascist elements out of our scene? At what point is that record worth so much to you that you would buy it knowing that you were actively contributing to something that is harming other people? The beginning of black metal—self-consciously bleak and featuring howled lyrics, crashing chords, and an often apocalyptic, misanthropic aesthetic—is usually traced to the English band Venom, which used the term as the title of its second album, in National Socialist black metal emerged from a darker environment, in the nineteen-nineties, that featured figures like Varg Vikernes, of the one-man band Burzum. In , while playing bass in the band Mayhem, he murdered the guitarist, a man known as Euronymous. Before being arrested and returned to Germany to face charges, he lived for a time in a West Virginia compound belonging to the neo-Nazi leader William Pierce. Among bands that are said today to fall into the category of N.
What makes music licensing so complicated?
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There were performances also last year by the National Arts Centre Orchestra under Alexander Shelley, which formed the basis of an Analekta recording. Yet knowing that madness in the concert hall is useless if there is no method in it, Boudreau cast the concerto in three traditional movements, fast-slow-fast, with an equally traditional, though elongated, cadenza at the end of the first. Harmonic language, likewise splitting the difference, was essentially tonal but so laden with added notes that key and function were elusive. The impression at points was of rival scores, equally vehement, being performed at once. But Boudreau is smart. By the minute mark the nervous little tune was beset by atonal devils which were, in turn, banished by the tolling of tubular bells. Maybe all of these things at once, which is what makes it characteristically contemporary. In there is no coherent set of rules for music to follow or expectations to meet.
