People say Rockstar just “Isn’t a rockstar anymore”
No, this is pretty much how I expect from washed up rockstars who’ve sold out and only care about reliving the glory days. Constantly shouting “Don’t you know who I am?” when anyone gives them any grief.
Good on them. $7500 for all future royalties is an absolute rip, especially coming out of Rockstar.
The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.
and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
GTA V/Online produced $8.5 billion in revenue.
I mean, I guess you’re not wrong, (how else could they be milking it for this much money but being cheap?) but it still makes them fucking cheap bastards.
Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.
Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.
Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!
should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage
I think it’s really clear that Rockstar is trying to avoid a repeat of past soundtracks and licensing issues and they want these up-front with no royalty payments to make in the future, so they don’t have to keep re-negotiating licensing (and having to remove/replace songs in old games).
I still think this guy was being smart for asking more, even if he asked too much. You’re right, he shouldn’t have high-balled, but he was smart enough to understand getting a percentage or royalties was probably almost assuredly out of the question.
You can’t really blame accountants for doing their job.
Actually, yeah I can. Every time a fucking bean-counter makes a living humans life worse at their job to save the company a buck is a great time to blame accountants for doing their fucking jobs.
Especially when they’re kind of a 1 hit wonder.
But asking for as much as they did, you’d think their songs were much more popular. They’re no Billy idol, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, etc.
If they’re a 1-hit wonder, maybe that’s why they want more up front: In case they gain no new listeners from the GTA 6 soundtrack and continue to be a 1-hit wonder.
It’s like why football players have insane-sounding contracts: Because in the future they won’t be able to make the same kind of money.
Sounds to me like homie was smart and thinking long-term.
Yeah but their an 80s new wave band. I don’t think they’re making new stuff these days.
Further cementing my point. If they’re not making new stuff and this deal gains them no new listeners: it’s a bad deal.
I don’t see the logic in that though. They can’t really expect to be paid so much more than groups who offer greater recognition. It’s like charging more for the Walmart brand over the name brand product.
I just heard some of their tracks and I feel like it wasn’t a huge loss not being able to hear a Duran Duran or Depeche Mode wannabe band while I’m murdering hookers in GTA6
I love Lemmy, but the general consensus of “fuck big corpo no matter what” attitude is kinda tiring. This is completely reasonable for Rockstar to reject the counter offer. Not to mention, Heaven 17 is not some big band to begin with.
Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
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?
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.
I’ve never heard of Heaven 17. On GTA V, there are a lot of bands than I had never heard of too. Rockstar introduced me to those bands, their other work, solos from those members, and other artists in those genres.
Frankly, if I was a musician that wasn’t already a huge star, I’d do it for FREE because of the massive GUARANTEED exposure.
Exposure doesn’t pay the bills.
It takes upward of 200 streams of a track on Spotify to earn a single penny. 20,000 streams to earn a dollar.
(For me and my personal expenses, this would mean I would need 40,000,000 streams per month to pay rent/pay bills/eat. I’m dirt poor and live a dirt poor budget. 40,000,000 streams to pay $1400 in rent is INSANE.)
That “exposure” can still add up to “not paying the bills.”
Also, if he gains no new listeners? He would have made a huge mistake not angling for more money.
This guy is being smart, and the rich just want people to THINK that exposure is worth it. Even Oprah pays in exposure and its bullshit. The company has got the fucking money to pay it they just don’t want to.
To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Artists die from not getting exposure. This isn’t one of those “play my wedding for exposure” things. It’s being a regular song playing in one of the world’s most popular game franchises.
They should get paid, sure, but telling them to fuck off because the rate wasn’t what they want is dumb.
