Bandai Namco Game Music’s Strategies for Leveraging Content, Proven Successful by Its Catalog of Over 6,000 Pieces of Music: Interview

Trending on Billboard Japan ‘s content culture is drawing attention on global streaming services and becoming even more influential. One of the types of content that is driving this phenomenon is game music. Game music is non-verbal content that transcends language barriers and spans genres. It is evolving into a global digital asset. In the latest of NexTone’s digital distribution business interview series, Billboard JAPAN spoke with Bandai Namco Game Music (BNGM), the music label operated by the Bandai Namco Group. Since launching the label in 2022, Bandai Namco has used NexTone’s digital distribution service and its copyright management scheme to leverage a wealth of untapped assets-the extensive catalog of game music it has built up over the past roughly 25 years. BNGM’s mission is to establish the value of this content not simply as mere game background music but as independent music content that goes beyond the bounds of games. We spoke with Norihiro Fukuda, a former record company employee who proposed the launch of Bandai Namco’s label, and Natsuko Kaneko, who cleared the rights for the label’s prodigious amount of music from past games. Could you explain what kind of label Bandai Namco Game Music is and talk a bit about its philosophy and mission? Norihiro Fukuda: BNGM’s concept is sharing the appeal of game music with the entire world. The way people have tended to look at game music is that there are games, and this music is simply a part of those games. We thought that if we placed the music front and center and shared it with the world, people would see its appeal. So you’d already realized the appeal of game music yourself. Fukuda: I used to work in a record company. It seemed to me that people in game companies had realized the appeal of the music, but it hadn’t occurred to them to try to share that appeal with others. That’s why when I later joined Bandai Namco Entertainment, I started working from the hypothesis that “if we put this game music out into the world, our output, and the way people look at this music, will change.” For example, in the case of Elden Ring , we’d heard that the game was beloved by many overseas players. I realized that since the game itself was selling so well, there was a lot of untapped potential for the game’s music. That’s what led us to set up the music label framework and start putting this music out. What aspects of BNGM’s handling of game music do you see as being especially important? What do you see as BNGM’s unique strengths? Fukuda: There’s a wide range of game music genres, but when it comes to the music that BNGM handles, it all begins with 8-bit, electronic music, like the music used in PAC-MAN . Game music later evolved to use PCM, so the music started to include samples. Over the past roughly 45 years, game music has developed an extremely deep history. That’s...

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