Styngr makes it easier to license music for video games

When it comes to getting music for games, Styngr is the only fully licensed major label partner that can get pre-cleared music into games.

The Santa Monica, California-based company got started on this mission in 2020, and now it has more than 100 million pre-cleared songs for use in PC, mobile, and console games. It has a software development kit (SDK) that makes it simple to integrate music into games. I talked to Stephen Cooper, chairman of Styngr and former CEO of Warner Music Group, in an interview about Styngr.

Cooper said that Styngr has licensed full music catalogs from the major labels including Universal, Sony, Warner and BMG. Styngr’s tech allows gamers to access and use music within games, enhancing the user experience and extending session length. And it allows gamers to play with the music they want, and Styngr enables game devs and the labels to make money on the music access at the same time.

Styngr also recently launched Soundboard, a scalable music product allowing players to personalize their in-game experiences with millions of pre-cleared music snippets from Warner Music Group artists, including music from Coldplay’s latest album, Moon Music.

In addition to enhancing the possibilities for licensed music in video games, the launch of Soundboard adds another monetization layer for video game developers. As a micro-transaction product for players, developers who integrate Soundboard into their games will receive a revenue share from every purchase.

Styngr also launched a product called Boombox, which is a microtransaction-based in-game music player that allows developers to launch and monetize playlists in their experiences. Within the first 36 hours of the release last fall, the Boombox reached over three million unique users, garnering 4.5 million total music streams across artists and genres.

And Styngr has also partnered with Moonsworth – developers of Lunar Client, the number one free all-in-one Minecraft mod pack – to bring fully licensed music from major labels into Minecraft for the first time on PC and console. By Q2 2025, Lunar Client will also offer an ad-funded version of its in-game radio — allowing all users to listen for free. Artists will benefit from a revenue share on every subscription purchased within Lunar Client. All of this has helped Styngr build up to about 30 employees.

Origins

Alex Tarrand, COO, and Oleg Butenko, CEO, founded Styngr back in 2020. Cooper, the former CEO of Warner Music Group, had known Butenko for a dozen years, as Butenko was instrumental in creating a streaming subscription service in Russia, a country that previously just pirated music. They worked together on and off and stayed in touch. While Cooper was still at Warner, Butenko came to him with the idea for Styngr. Warner had a venture capital fund and made an investment into Styngr.

Cooper left Warner Music Group in 2023. And Butenko asked him to help with the business. They’ve been working together for more than 18 months. Cooper has helped with various business issues and has learned Styngr’s business well.

“This is really pretty unique as far as trying to go after music and games,” Cooper said. “It’s unique not only because it has this technological bridge between music and gaming, but it has been successful. His team has been successful in getting the music industry led by the major labels and BMG to license their music to Styngr for use in gaming. I believe that this model is the model for the utilization of music and gaming in the future.”

In the past, licensing music for video games was a complicated process. But Styngr teamed up with the music labels to unlock recorded music for the collective benefit of players, game developers, artists and rights holders. Music has always played a significant role in self-expression and identity formation, Styngr says, and its products so far bring music into games in a natural and fun way.

Styngr has the agreements in place as well as proprietary technology and SDKs to simplify the process. And Styngr takes care of user analytics, label rights, publishing, and royalty payments. Perhaps it will be easier to make music-based games in the future, as there aren’t nearly as many of them now as there used to be in the days of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

The most recent music game I’ve come across is Realize Music, a wellness app which lets people belt out popular favorite songs while in the privacy of virtual reality. Mike Wilson, cofounder of Realize Music, noted it took about 15 months to negotiate the licenses with two music labels for a million songs.

“I’m surprised that’s all the time it took,” Cooper said. “The current model for music in gaming, putting aside the production music that are sometimes used as scores for games, is getting very limited licenses for a very limited set of tracks, for a limited period of time, for a negotiated sum of money.”

He added, “When I say a limited number of tracks, it could be a handful to a couple dozen, but in the main, other than playing music in the background from Spotify or Apple or Amazon, the utilization of music inside games is limited to that relatively small universe of music that has been licensed by the game in these ongoing but one-off transactions.”

But Styngr managed to negotiate something different.

The Styngr solution

“What Stynger does with its licenses is make available to gamers the entire catalogs of Universal, Sony Warner, BMG and others. As a result, people will have access to all of these catalogs and can then listen to the music that they want to listen to versus the music that somebody has presumed that they want to listen to. I’ve heard that one of the biggest complaints when gamers are surveyed is that they don’t have access inside the game to the music they want, and Styngr will provide that.”

Styngr acts as a bridge between the worlds of music and gaming, Cooper said. It lets developers pull music from the catalogs of the labels and use it in slices at moments in a game when the devs want to use it. Gamers can also do the same thing. The music is refreshed weekly with all the new releases. The music can take the form of either the whole song or a piece of a track.

“The music is adaptable to any model that the platform or the developer chooses for its game,” said Cooper. “We can deal with ad-based models, time-based models, subscription-based models and micro transactions. So we cover the gamut, and we go anywhere from full tracks to snippets, which we call Styngs. If I had a particularly satisfying bit of action inside a game and I wanted to celebrate it, I personally wouldn’t do it with an entire track. But I might do it with three or four seconds of a song. It would be something that that would convey my emotion at a particular achievement inside the game.”

With ads, listening to music in exchange for listening to an audio ad is a fair exchange, Cooper said. That’s what happens with something like Spotify.

“Our data show that access to music inside a game lengthens the session,” Cooper said. “It’s a mechanism which, for the developers or the platforms, will potentially reduce churn and attract new participants to their games. And because session length increases, that presents opportunities to the games themselves and the developers of those games.”

Cooper hopes it will take off and prove that the gaming world has undervalued the power of music. And he hopes the music labels will all come to realize they have underestimated games and overvalued music in the past.

“They will finally get it, and it will be in a much better state of equilibrium between the gaming world and music world, because both sides will benefit,” he said. “I like the people at Styngr. And I see this as a tremendous opportunity for both music and gaming, and I see that it can result in in good news for both sides of that coin.”