EMI Production: Currently Playing

It’s been - to put it mildly - an incredibly unusual year as large parts of the world ground to a dramatic halt in the first quarter, threatening social economic instability. Yet, there seem to be some interesting, if not positive, outcomes - the games industry has beaten the odds and seems to have flourished.

If you look purely at the UK gaming charts, you could be led to believe that there are only a handful of games on the market, as the same few titles have been topping the charts almost in rotation since December. However, there are so many games on so many platforms, the consumer is spoilt for choice in these times, and it’s really showing in the stats.

PlayStation reported a 32% year-on-year revenue increase for the last quarter, not in small part due to lockdown. And between January and March, the overall number of UK mobile gaming downloads had increased by 35%.

It goes without saying that the music industry and the gaming industry are already inextricably linked which is part of the reason why at EMI PM we are looking to better service the gaming industry with our new innovative approach to customisable library music. We recently launched our scoring toolkit label – KPM Toolkit - which allows editors to easily adapt our music to image and create soundtracks from live recorded orchestral elements. Plus, all our in-house productions come with stems available. Aside from these projects, particularly good is our collaborative drum & bass album with Hospital Records which also comes with an MC vocal sample pack that can be added into soundtracks.

For this edition, I've pulled together a collection of music inspired by my favourite sports games. View the playlist here.

- Courtney Dore, EMI Production Music consultant