You Heard VGM WHERE?

Originally Posted by Elorin

I'm really not sure how these production companies get the rights to use the music but in any case...

I imagine they ring up whoever owns the rights to the tune (The composer or his publishers) and ask how much it'd cost to use the music, then pay some money over and use it. What makes you think that licensing a piece of music that has featured in a computer game would be any different from licensing a piece of music from a tv programme or film or just released as a record? At the end of the day, no matter how much you want it to be unique and special, vgm is just commercially produced music the same as anything else.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

In this day and age of trigger-happy litigation, it'd cost more for a company to try to sneak something like that in than to just go ahead and pay up front for it. Ad agencies have whole departments devoted to doing deals on using bits of music and with many vgm types releasing tunes through mainstream publishers, I'd be far more surprised if they tried to use a bit of unlicensed music than if they paid for it properly.

Heh, I remember Hot Chip getting paid by Warner for 4.5 seconds of music used during an episode of Nip/Tuck, things like that are always very much above board.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

It depends on who owns the publishing rights. It might be the composer, it might be a record company if an official soundtrack cd was released or sometimes, when a small developer goes bust, the assets will be sold off, including the rights to the IP, be that music, characters, the name of the game or whatever else. The developer would only own the music rights in the first place if the music was written in-house. If they employed a composer then chances are the composer would retain the rights to the music.

How ya doing, buddy?