If you have an indemnity from those artists where they agree that all the composition that they give you is their own, and if any of it is found not to be, it’s on them. If a dance act has used a sample and you’re not aware of it because it’s embedded somewhere in the track, you need to be careful. “The main thing with any kind of contract is to make sure that they give you indemnity around any issues surrounding copyright. "The main thing with any kind of contract is to make sure that they give you indemnity around any issues surrounding copyright." In regards to the legalities, there are a few things to consider, and a few things Bennet and Roll7 learned after putting together the soundtrack on OlliOlli. Ultimately it’s not a process you would necessarily go through if you weren’t a little bit OCD about music.” It was so difficult because it was a remix, and there were so many people involved.
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There was a guy in Amsterdam who hadn’t got back to us for three months. We literally only signed the contract for it last week, but we had been in negotiations for the last six months, having to get all of the different parties to sign up. We’ve got one track on the OlliOlli2 soundtrack that I’m most proud of because it was my favourite track of all of last year, which is ‘ Shoulda Known’, the Ganz remix of the Louis Futon track. “It still is about hunting those people down. Which isn’t to say that it was all smooth sailing, as not only were there various different legalities that Roll7 needed to consider, but some of the tracks had their own hiccups when it came to obtaining the rights to use the track in the game. It wasn’t as much of an uphill struggle as I think we might have thought it was going to be.” “Not only that, but they’d be interested because either they skated when they were growing up and listened to all the music associated with that, and they’d love to have their music do the same now, or they were absolute computer nuts, really into computer games, and it was their dream to have their music in a game. “When we spoke to artists directly, they would say, ‘That sounds awesome. Artists like Dorian Concept, Tobacco, Slugabed, and Lone have featured across the games, and while they’re by no means small, they are approachable.
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It’s available for free online anyway.’ So you help their art live on somewhere else.”īy and large, that’s what Roll7 has done with its games, focusing on the genres of IDM, dance and electronica for OlliOlli and OlliOlli2, and more chiptune-influenced music for Not a Hero. At that level it’s kind of just, ‘Okay, cool, you can have the track. Because of that you’re able to get them on your contractual terms, so you’re not wrangling for anything.
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“If you’re clever about it and you pick only independent artists,” Bennet tells me, “and you’re scouring Bandcamp and looking in those avenues, you’re going to find people who are mostly without a label, who probably don’t even gig, and they’re looking for any kind of revenue. "It wasn’t as much of an uphill struggle as I think we might have thought it was going to be." Being a three-person developer in the South of London, that means that they’ve, by necessity, set their sights on musicians in a similar position to them by and large independent, pushing themselves out digitally through services like Bandcamp and Spotify. We recently talked to Simon Bennet of Roll7 about how, even when you think you know what you’re going for in terms of licensing music, you’re not always right, when the soundtrack for OlliOlli took a sharp left turn away from punk rock and into the more relaxed and frustration-diffusing avenues of electronic music.įor all three of Roll7’s games, OlliOlli, OlliOlli2, and Not a Hero, the developer has sourced their music from existing tracks, putting together what are essentially extended compilation albums that accompany the levels and mechanics of their games. Invariably, marrying the perfect soundtrack to a game requires bringing in outside help, be it a composer to make an original track, or licensing something already out there that encapsulates exactly the kind of mood that you’re going for.