Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 4-5

123456 TRIBUNE 5 BUSINESS Chicagoland Business: for you. Local Voice Data services for Chicagoland business. Your business relies on for reaching across the world.Now you can rely on us for local voice and extensive portfolio of local voice and data solutions service with popular calling capacity private frame relay and local ATM.Business continuity and video conferencing solutions are also available to help productivity.It’s easy to make a change for the better! at 1 866 288-1661 or visit us at att.com/chicagolocal Get started with 1 month of FREE local voice service 1866288-1661 TheRight Choice for LocalVoice SM Month of FREE Local Voice Service. Subject to availability.One month free offer includes monthly recurring charge and requires new customers to identify as their primary carrier for local exchange services.Offer expires All In One SM calls in excess of 1500 minutes per month per line will be assessed a per minute charge based on applicable tariff rates. By Alex Pham Special to the Tribune Forget the MTV Music Awards.

The latest sign a band has arrived on the music scene is when its song blares while two video-game characters pummel each other. For years, record companies considered licensing their music to video games as a meager but steady source of cash. Game developers had tiny budgets compared with movie studios, so games often ended up with obscure songs. But as sales of video games rival Hollywood box-office receipts, the music industry is taking notice. Labels now view a dedicated fan base of young, affluent launching pads for up- and-coming artists.

Game companies, in turn, are trying to capitalize on their newfound popularity, becoming more choosy about which songs they take, asking labels to help promote the games and even popping the artists into the games. Last week, for instance, software firm Electronic Arts Inc. announced a deal with Island Def Jam Music Group to jointly produce a series of wrestling games featuring the record top hip-hop artists, includ- ing Method Man, DMX, Luda- cris and Noreaga. The deal, hatched by Def Jam President Kevin Liles and EA Chief Executive Larry Probst, is unusual in that it involve licensing songs, the typical route for getting music into games. Instead, Def Jam artists will get royalties on game sales.

what happens is that a pre-existing piece of music is licensed into a said Jeff Kempler, head of business and legal affairs at Island Def Jam, a division of Universal Music Group. this, we felt we could together create an integrated entertainment experience with music built into the game from the ground up, as opposed to music added at the end, like paint on a finished In the 1990s, video games amassed a fan base that included established musicians such as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who wrote the score for Id an avid gamer, is devoting six months to making music and sound effects for the coming Though games have become big business, bringing in more than $6 billion a year in software sales, budgets for song licensing remain small compared with film budgets. Game companies typically pay $2,000 for a song from an unknown band to $25,000 for established acts. That pales in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of dollars movie studios often pony up for each song. Much of the desire for placing music into games lies in the marketing boost these games provide, particularly as the music industry veers into a rough patch of declining sales after years of slow but steady growth.

Last year, sales of music and music videos in the U.S. sagged 4 percent to $13.7 billion. are an intriguing said Lee Stimmel, vice president of marketing for Atlantic Records, which has licensed artists such as Brandy, Nappy Roots and Audiovent to EA. amount of time people spend in front of these games is enormous. In a game, your song is repeated over and over.

is still the No. 1way to sell records, but the industry needs more ways to cut through the media clutter and create awareness for our artists on a number of different levels. This is just one more platform for us to get into the consciousness and hopefully sell more Atlantic is arranging for its artists to appear at game industry events and is promoting EA games alongside its albums. Radio station callers, for example, can win a bundled prize of mu- sic and games, Stimmel said. Store displays will cross-promote the CDs and the games.

EA, in turn, will start displaying artist names and song titles within all of its sports games, beginning with Football to be released Wednesday. Though EA will continue to pay a licensing fee to labels, the Redwood City, game publisher wants to forge deeper ties with labels. This year it hired Steve Schnur, a music industry executive, to be its representa- tive. key is that not just the old-school buyer-seller said Schnur, who has worked for Capitol Records, Elektra Entertainment and Arista Records. music now takes on a whole new level.

become marketing Artists, who often are gamers, are eager to get involved, seeing the deal not so much as marketing as an opportunity to get their songs into games grown up with. Audiovent, a rock band from Calabasas, turned down a Pepsi commercial but had no problems licensing a song for Football like to think of ourselves as a band with said 23-year-old drummer, Jamin Wilcox, who has played video games since he was 9. was cool because it was an exercise in melding two entertainment Alex Pham is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper. Video games, musicians help promote each other Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has made music and sound effects for Id video games. ence.

Every hard-core gamer has 5.1[surround going. too cheap and too easy to not just the equipment that has changed. Games like Pro have songs from popular punk bands. from Bethesda Softworks and from Microsoft include original scores with medieval themes. And the music in Electronic popular of was performed by the Seattle Symphony.

In Japan, where video games are readily accepted into mainstream culture as works of art, game music is sold in record stores. The music from Ninten- for instance, topped the charts for weeks. With U.S. game sales topping $11billion, outpacing the movie industry, video game composers are getting broad distribution. Still, few but ardent game fans know who they are.

Composer and performer Jeremy work, for instance, is on more than 5 million copies of games sold in 2001. work is diverse. The son of a music teacher, he created a mystical score for the video game version of Potter and the and a patriotic-sound score for C.O.M.: U.S. Navy a coming game from Sony Computer Entertainment America. are spending upwards of 40 hours on some of these Soule said.

you spend 40 hours with anything, you are going to remember it, especially if you enjoy Soule, Nobuo Uematsu and Michael Giacchino are members of the game elite group of notable composers. And Yuzo Koshiro, who created the scores for such Sega classics as of has become a household name in Japan. is a rock star in Japan. In Japan, they do not discriminate between the different Soule said. Other top game composers include Masato Nakamura, who did the music for The and David Wise, the British composer who did the music for Kong Keiichi Sugiyama, who created the techno-pop music for appears to be on his way to joining the upper echelon of game composers.

Crossover difficult But joining the top tier of game composers does not guarantee a jump into other media. Giacchino, whose game credits include the symphonic scores of Lost and all of the of games, has made the leap, but only through help from outside sources. Dreamworks decided to do a game on Lost they asked me to put together some Giacchino said. they made a big presentation for Steven Spielberg. He and his kids are really into video Spielberg, who is known to get involved in the creation of games about his films, liked score.

said, going to record this with a live orchestra, I said, really planned on With blessing, the scores for and of used the 90- piece Seattle Symphony, and the director told other producers just how impressed he was with work. In addition to his gaming work, Giacchino creates the music for the ABC series Spielberg probably never know just how much he has helped me just by saying a few good words here and George Lucas, too, has taken note of the gaming composers. LucasArts, the video and computer game arm of entertainment empire, recently announced that Soule would create original music for Wars Bounty The game will also include music from the movie Wars: Episode of the created by Academy Award- winning composer John Williams. Still, Hollywood has been slow to notice the work of video game composers. flops as movie great mystery is, why Nobuo Uematsu scored the music for several do the score for the asked Soule.

love Elliot Soule said, referring to the composer who did the movie score. a great composer; but you wonder if maybe the movie did not do so well because it have some of the The movie was a financial disaster. The movie, which cost about $140 million to make, had little connection with the international best- selling games from which it took its name. Nor did it have the same music, characters or even the same setting as any of the games. big said.

my opinion, I think Nobuo Uematsu is almost half of I think the music played a huge role in Steven L. Kent, the author of Ultimate History of Video is a freelance writer in Issaquah, Wash. COMPOSERS: Gaming's popularity helps artists CONTINUEDFROMPAGE1 Composer Michael Giacchino presented his music for Lost to movie producer Steven Spielberg..