Warner Music acquires Microsoft game music rights
by James Ransom-Wiley 
{ Feb 28th 2007 at 7:55PM }
Warner Chappell Music, the publishing division of Warner Music Group, has reached an agreement to claim, administer, and license music compositions owned and controlled by Microsoft. The catalog includes several thousand compositions; notably those featured in the Halo, Age of Empires, Fable, and Kameo series. Music composed for future Microsoft published games is also included in the deal.Warner Chappell will be responsible for creating new opportunities to showcase Microsoft's music worldwide. "By partnering with Warner Chappell, we can continue to extend the value and experiences for our music and also inspire and give further recognition to the composers who are dedicated to working on video games," said Microsoft senior director Ed Ventura.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
matthew @ Feb 28th 2007 8:00PM
What was the point of microsoft doing that?
vidGuy @ Feb 28th 2007 8:04PM
Does this make the whole Halo-music-in-Guitar-Hero-2 thing more or less likely?
I vote less likely.
John Doe @ Feb 28th 2007 8:07PM
Sweet! Age of Empires music!
steve17 @ Feb 28th 2007 10:05PM
ok. im a die hard halo fan. and that includes its particular soundtrack. but honestly; who give a shit? who would by the rights to video game music? are people gonna be blastin the halo soundtrack in their car? i think not.
more nonsensical things coming out of this world we live in.
rashers @ Mar 1st 2007 3:46AM
yeah but they might want to listen to the excellent Crackdown soundtrack. Anyone know if that's being released (like the GTA ones were) ?
Bill @ Mar 1st 2007 9:44AM
Part of the reason is likely that managing publishing rights is a very complicated thing to do. Microsoft is smart to license Warner/Chappell to administer the publishing rights to their catalog. Warner/Chappell has a lot of experience and a lot of pre-existing licensing deals that they can leverage the Microsoft catalog with, including Guitar Hero, Ringtones, Sheet Music and Guitar Tab. I'd expect Musicnotes.com to be selling sheet music for the Halo theme soon, now that this deal is in place, since they have a contract in place that allows them to sell sheet music and guitar tab from the Warner/Chappell catalog, but nothing directly with Microsoft.
Of course, Microsoft still gets paid royalties from all licensing done by Warner/Chappell - Warner/Chappell just gets a cut for administration (or at least this is how these deals normally work).
Basically, expect Microsoft's music to be much more widely licensed than previously since it's now in the hands of a company who's expertise is in these sorts of things.