Game Music Digest | Fortnite's Music Emotes & Mario Kart's 200-Track Jukebox
Plus: A XXXTentacion collab in Fortnite sets a new record for most CCUs in a non-Epic Island
Game Music Digest is a weekly wrap-up of the most interesting stories at the intersection of video games and music, brought to you by the music and gaming newsletter, MusicEXP.
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Quick Update: I’m MCing the video game tracks at SXSW London on Wednesday and Thursday. Let’s grab a beer if you wanna chat music and video games.
Fortnite’s Sabrina Carpenter Dance-Off Experience & Music Emote Domination
In Brief: Fortnite is inviting players to jump onstage with Sabrina Carpenter in a new dance-themed experience, Dance with Sabrina, which launched on May 30. Players fill up their “heart meter” by dancing along in time to Sabrina Carpenter songs like ‘Bad Chem’ and ‘Espresso’. Players who match the most beats get to appear alongside Sabrina in a finale snapshot, and you can jam with friends in between shows. The map peaked at 72,800 concurrent players (this is very good!) and has had 654k unique users since launch, according to Fortnite.gg.
Elsewhere in Fortnite, four tracks by rapper XXXTentacion have been implemented into the game as part of a collaboration with the popular Fortnite Creative map, Super Red vs Blue. A new XXX Tentacion dance emote, ‘Look at Me’, has also landed in the Fortnite Shop alongside new emotes from Madison Beer and Kendrick Lamar priced at 500 V-Bucks (roughly £3.50).
These new updates and items are landing at a great time for Fortnite as the game is back on the iOS store after a five-year hiatus following Epic’s court win with Apple over App Store fees. There have been more than 2.1 million downloads of the game on iOS since its release on May 21, according to Sensor Tower data obtained by MusicEXP, and there are now 550k daily active users on iOS alone.
EXP: On April 8, Fortnite announced Sabrina Carpenter as the Icon (headline act) for Season 8 of its rhythm game mode, Fortnite Festival. This announcement introduced a range of Sabrina Carpenter-themed cosmetics into the game, including music (Jam Tracks), skins (outfits), and emotes, with the Sabrina Carpenter skin and dance emote combo resulting in some hilarious viral videos.
The Fortnite Season 8 announcement also repositioned music emotes and overhauled how they’re used in Fortnite, with emotes containing dance moves and music getting an official rebrand to ‘Dance Emotes’. This update also introduced ‘Synced Emotes’, allowing players who don’t own Dance Emotes to use them in group dance-offs with nearby players at the press of a button.
This recent focus on repositioning emotes as dance emotes suggests they’re a priority for Fortnite. Imo, this is because:
Dance emotes add a new monetisation layer to in-game music. As an example, ‘Please Please Please’ is available as a Jam Track AND as a dance emote. This means players can play the song in Fortnite Festival, set it as lobby music or custom victory music, or dance to it in-game with their friends.
Any additional monetisation layers from music-related item sales are a great way to recoup on licensing costs for music (and IP in general).
Dance emotes are an easy win from a social/marketing perspective. As we’ve seen with the Sabrina Carpenter emotes, they can be used by players to create hilarious viral videos that perform well as short-form media content.
This focus on quick wins around viral marketing beats plays into Epic’s growing focus on social trends. In addition to music and emotes from some of the biggest acts in the world, Epic also creates emotes based on viral dance moves from TikTok. Check out this video here for some of the best. Dexerto also has a near-complete list of all the dance emotes in the game.
Emotes in video games have a 25-year history, with their origins dating back to early MMOs such as Second Life and Phantasy Star Online. While there are plenty of examples of emotes using music, the sale of music emotes with licensed songs is a relatively new market, with only a handful of games such as Free Fire Max, PUBG, and Roblox supporting the sale of emotes with licensed music.
Licensed music is underutilised and undermonetised in video games. I believe there’s a huge market for Fortnite’s so-called ‘Dance emotes’ and I’m surprised more video games aren’t following Epic’s lead by bundling licensed music into their emotes –especially companies who have already launched music partnerships.
As an example, Blizzard’s collaboration with K-pop group LE SSERAFIM in Overwatch 2 introduced themed cosmetics including dance emotes into its Shop – but none of these dance emotes play music from LE SSERAFIM when they’re used. The lack of music in Overwatch 2 emotes is something players have been complaining about since the game’s launch.
It’s worth highlighting that Fortnite, Free Fire Max and PUBG are three of the biggest video games in the world. Garena’s battle royale game Free Fire Max has 76 million daily active users on mobile devices, according to Sensor Tower data gathered by MusicEXP, while the mobile version of PUBG has 21 million daily active users (not including figures from PC and console!)
So why aren’t more live service games using Fortnite-style dance emotes? It’s likely a money and licensing issue. Epic has a massive in-house team of legal and music rights experts overseeing not just music collabs but partnerships across a broad range of IPs and sectors from sports, entertainment, film and TV. Licensing music for video games isn’t cheap. It can also be incredibly complicated due to the various usage implications and the fact that many live-service video games are broadcast on streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube.
Honestly, I don’t know what the solution is here. But if you’ve got thoughts on any of the above, I’d love to read them in the comments section.
Nintendo’s Biggest Soundtrack Yet? 200 New ‘Jukebox’ Arrangements for Mario Kart World
In brief: In a new ‘Ask the Developer’ feature about Mario Kart World on Nintendo’s website, Nintendo composer Atsuko Asahi said the team has written “over 200” brand-new music arrangements, many of them live-recorded, which will play on the jukebox in the game’s Free Roam mode (basically an in-game radio station). This is on top of all the new music written for the game’s main race tracks. According to Asahi:
“For other modes like Free Roam, we prepared lots of music in addition to course themes and made it so the game would automatically select the right track depending on the situation. During development, we called this the "jukebox". For this, we created lots of arrangements of music composed for past Super Mario and Mario Kart games.”
EXP: Mario Kart World is the next entry in Nintendo’s Mario Kart franchise and lands as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5. With over 200 songs in the Jukebox alone, this is shaping up to be the most ambitious video game soundtrack ever written for a Nintendo game.
Mario Kart World is the first Mario Kart game to include a Free Roam mode, which lets players explore the game’s interconnected world map. As players explore familiar environments from past Mario games, they’ll hear new arrangements of music from those environments.
This new 'open-world’ design approach to Mario Kart opens up a lot of opportunities from a music perspective. Asahi has said these new arrangements will include music from Super Mario games rather than just Mario Kart games, so expect to hear new takes on fan favourites from Super Mario 64, Super Mario World and many more.
Nintendo takes the music in Mario Kart incredibly seriously. They have an in-house band – the appropriately named Mario Kart Band – comprised of more than 20 musicians from Nintendo’s music team and famous session players in Japan. Notable appearances include Satoshi Bando from Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square on drums, and Takashi Masuzaki and Kazuki Katsuta on guitar and alto sax from Japanese jazz fusion band Dimension.
XXXTentacion Super Red vs Blue Event in Fortnite is a Record-Breaking Success
In brief: SUPER RED VS BLUE, a popular Creator-made Fortnite map developed in UEFN, hosted a special concert event featuring the late rapper, XXXTentacion. The game’s developer, JOGO, uploaded a video of the full event on X, which features four of the rapper’s songs. The event peaked at 235k concurrent users, during which it was the most popular experience on the entire Fortnite platform. According to JOGO’s founder, this is the first Creative (user-made) experience to surpass CCUs for the game’s main modes such as Battle Royale, and is the highest CCU ever for a Creator-made map.
EXP: While this isn’t an ‘official Fortnite event’, news releases promoting the event say JOGO worked in partnership with Fortnite’s creator Epic Games, record label EMPIRE, and the XXXTentacion estate to bring this collaboration to life. The involvement of Epic checks out given a new XXXTentacion emote was launched last week.
235k concurrent users for a Creator-made experience is no joke! These are seriously impressive numbers, demonstrated by JOGO’s claim that the event briefly surpassed CCUs for Epic’s own game modes.
As this event wasn’t created by Epic Games and didn’t benefit from promo across Fortnite’s first-party marketing channels, this may be your first time hearing about this XXXTentaction concert. But make no mistake: this event is the Fortnite Creative equivalent of the Fortnite Travis Scott concert. It proves to people that music experiences can work in Creator-made maps with the right artists.
Imagine how many more people might have checked this event out if it got the same levels of coverage as a traditional Fortnite concert?
The success of this concert within a Creator-made map should hopefully inspire similar activations in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if JOGO already have a growing number of emails from major labels seeking similar activations for their artists!
In other news…
If you’re at SXSW London on Wednesday, make sure you check out the Sky x AURORA homecoming virtual concert experience at the Barbican Centre (Cinema 1) at 8:30 PM. This is a virtual concert experience for Aurora in the video game Sky: Children of the Light. I’ll be moderating the panel discussion afterward. [Link]
A new survey of conducted by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra examined the link between orchestral music and video games, finding 15% of people have discovered orchestral music through video games. [Link]
Epic Games successfully defended itself in a patent infringement case over virtual concerts brought by Utherverse Gaming LLC. This case was nonsense to begin with. As Epic points out in its defence per reporting from MBW, “The process described in the patent had been used before the patent was filed. The company cited the game StarCraft II, as well as other patent applications, including one by Sony Corp.” [Link]
VR Rhythm Game ‘Maestro’ is getting a Star Wars music pack next month ahead of its PSVR2 launch. [Link]
Music Radar speaks to the creators of Music League, a music discovery game that lets players discover and vote on music in a “Fantasy Sports-aping model”. [Link]
Dead as Disco - an upcoming beat ‘em up rhythm game where combat is synched to music - is shaping up to be the next Hi-Fi Rush if player feedback from its playtests is anything to go by! “Honestly it looks like something suda51 would have made” [Link]
Stockholm-based label Savage Roar and Warner Music have launched a new Roblox music integration deal in collaboration with The Gang Studios. [Link]
The Sims hosted a special live stream with Megan Thee Stallion. [Link]
Comic Book has a decent rundown of historic video game trailers with licensed music. [Link]
Listen to…
Help, I can’t stop listening to Midwest Minecraft emo! [Link]
Fancy watching a 13-minute music theory video analysing the saxophone solo in the song Dolphin Shoals from the last Mario Kart game? Of course you do. [Link]
Sticking with the Mario Kart vibes, I’d recommend listening to the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square if you’ve never heard of them. Their album Truth is a great place to start. Most Japanese game composers cite T-Square (along with Casiopea) as one of their biggest music influences. [Link]