Jeremy Soule wins at MTV's 2006 VMA's
 

From the email -

'Attention Elder Scrolls and Soule Music Fans!

We at DirectSong are excited to announce that the masses have cast their vote and the first annual MTV Video Music Award has been awarded to Composer Jeremy Soule and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for Best Video Game Score!

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion marks Jeremy Soule's return to the Elder Scrolls Massive Role-Playing Universe, having scored its enormously successful predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Jeremy wrote over an hour of beautiful and epic music for Bethesda's Award-Winning Sequel installment, Oblivion.

"It's truly an honor to be selected by a world audience for this award. The team at Bethesda Game Studios created a truly great game and it was a privilege to work with such talented people. I also want to give special thanks to Oblivion creator Todd Howard for allowing me the creative freedom to experiment with the score. With this award tonight, I feel that Oblivion has been one of the most memorable and enjoyable projects of my career. For those that have followed my music and supported me over the years, please know that I appreciate your kindness and love for my work! Thank you for your vote and for helping to highlight the music of this emerging medium."
- Jeremy Soule'


I must say i'm pleased with this. Soule has always composed some fantastic music and I really enjoyed most of the tracks on the Oblivion OST. I'm surprised MTV even caters for video game music though!

What does everyone else think?

Soule is good, but Tales of Legendia deserved it more.

Shadow of the Colossus should've been the winner, but it wasn't even nominated. Great for Jeremy, though.

There was a video game music award at the VMA's? Damn, now I kind of wish I'd watched it. Were there even any other nominees? xD

Yay for Jeremy! I've been a follower of his ever since Secret of Evermore and to see him finally win a award for his work is really awesome.

Looking at the nominees, I'm trying to figure out how in the hell Electroplankton was nominated.

The game is genius, but you're creating your own soundtrack, so how the fuck would that work out to an award?

EDIT: Oh yeah, props to MTV for separating Best Video Game Soundtrack and Best Video Game Score, essentially preventing stupid shit like Marc Ecko's Getting Up from stealing all the awards away from original soundtracks.

My initial thought was how did an original score win when licensed soundtracks draw so much mainstream attention. Good for Jeremy, though.

Original nominees...

Best Video Game Score
Hitman: Blood Money (Jesper Kyd)
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Tom Salta)
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (Leon Willett and Even 'Magnet' Johansen)
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Jeremy Soule and Julian Soule)
Electroplankton (User Generated Soundtrack)

Hmm, I guess I notice a trend in there, outside of the gimmicky Electroplankton (you can make music, but you can't save it...doh! Did anyone even buy that game?). Meh overall...

But yeah...At the VERY least, they finally decided to seperate licensed junk from original music. That's a start...

Not to sound like a Wapanese fan or anything, but it seems a bit peculiar that the list of nominees is composed entirely of people from Western descent. There's no names like Noriyuki Iwadare, Kenji Ito, Naofumi Hataya, etc.

Also, and I might be incorrect on this, but all of the above games were developed by North American studios, were they not?

That list seems rather bland to me; I would not be surprised if the panel who chose the nominations was inherently biased toward certain genres/consoles and didn't take much time to consider scores outside of their own, collective interests.

Electroplankton is a Japanese game.

The VMAs are a joke. As Crash mentioned, there is such an apparent bias in the list of nominees, that it makes voting have no meaning.

North American/Western VGM is leagues behind Japanese musics. Seriously. Soule is decent at best when compared to the best that the Japanese have to offer in the genre. I never had a thorough enjoyment for his music to be perfectly honest. The selection is indeed poor and biased, as Crash stated.