World's largest classical music record label, Naxos, partners with Reactional Music on music personalisation for gaming

23 October 2024 - Press release

Game developers will be able to access Naxos’ classical, cultural, world, folk and regional music catalogues in a significant expansion of Reactional’s music delivery platform 

Naxos to explore creating interactive soundtracks for all interactive platforms

  

Reactional Music, the interactive music personalisation engine and delivery platform that connects the worlds of music and games, has agreed a global licensing partnership with the world’s largest classical and regional music rights holder, Naxos.

The partnership brings the world's biggest classical music catalogue to game developers and gamers. Founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, Naxos comprises numerous companies, divisions, imprints, and labels covering classical, world, folk, jazz and cultural music from across the world.

The Reactional Platform allows game developers to create interactive music soundtracks in games. It also enables music to be personalised within a game in real time by the gamer, becoming the soundtrack to the game, in key and in time with gameplay. It does not affect the master recording.

Naxos and Reactional have also confirmed that they are exploring a collaboration on the composition of interactive soundtracks, allowing composed music to be generated in real time around the gamer and gameplay.

The partnership significantly expands and diversifies Reactional’s music delivery portfolio for game developers around the world, while Naxos becomes the latest in a growing network of rights holder partners who will gain deeper access to games developers and the global games market.

“With 14,000 games released on PC, 8,000 on console and thousands more on mobile each year, the diversity of games development across five continents is huge. The partnership with Naxos is important as it brings music scores from every region of the world together along with an incredible catalogue of classical music. Naxos has a vision and understanding of the transformations that are taking place and the new opportunities that now exist for creative and commercial use and consumption of music,” said Reactional Music President David Knox.

Håkan Lagerqvist, CEO of Naxos Digital Services, added, “Our partnership with Reactional Music is incredibly exciting. Reach and access into interactive and game developers and their customers and gamers is an important step for Naxos. 

“Game developers are everywhere. They should be able to more easily access music scores and tracks that are creatively and culturally diverse so they can create and explore without limitation. For gamers, Naxos brings a pallet of ideas and choice that can work in so many different worlds and interactive experiences.

“Naxos will also explore how our composers’ work and our music catalogues can be enabled as full interactive game soundtracks. These are generated in real time note by note around the gameplay. This is potentially incredibly exciting. It is also a step towards enabling music to be used under license by creators, developers and enablers in all areas of interactive.”

Reactional is driving next-generation musical experiences in games and interactive worlds. Reactional’s interactive music and personalisation engine allows music, artists, games developers and gamers to be connected in new ways.

Reactional is pioneering commercial music to be enabled as an in-game purchase at scale for the first time. In a global games market worth $223.1 billion* in 2023, in-game purchases totalled $125.7 billion, of which $72.5 billion was spent on cosmetic content and in-game personalisation. However, music has so far accounted for less than 0.01 percent of this spend. Changing consumer consumption habits and an increase in personalisation in all digital worlds means that spending on in-game personalisation is predicted to grow to $100 billion by 2029.

Reactional Music has partnered with over 50 music rights holders worldwide over the past three years as it grows its music delivery platform catalogue, including Beggars Group, Defected Records, Cherry Red Records, Hopeless Records, Hipgnosis Song Management and leading production music groups including APM Music, Soundstripe and Alibi.

 

*MIDiA Research Global Games Forecast 10/23