Song Selection FAQ | Forums

[rcole_sooner]

I can almost guarantee they did not start asking for the songs only a month before a pack was released.

I would think that process would start many months before any planned release.

[TomKQT]

I can almost guarantee they did not start asking for the songs only a month before a pack was released.

I would think that process would start many months before any planned release.

Yes, but my question was more about these themed packs where the songs are somehow tied together, but from various artists - so they are not licenced together. I cannot imagine this process (from my extremely limited knowledge) without having some of the songs ready-to-go for longer time, in some sort of a song pool

[JarredMcAdams]

I wonder how do you make themed packs like the recent "Shamrock Song Pack"? What I mean is - it seems that licencing a song (and notetracking it) could take some time which probably isn't really predictable, so is it even possible to say "let's make an Irish pack the next month, let's go ask for some Irish songs"?
Or do you just keep some already licenced single songs for later use, even longer time (months)?

Also - how hard was to get Zombie? That's again after some time an extremely well-known song, I think we would have hard time finding somebody who doesn't know it. And AFAIK it was never in a music game before.

Thanks

I can't go into too much detail about any particular song, but I can give you a little bit insight into how we plan for themed packs like this one. It does in fact start many months in advance. Any time we have something we want to go out on a particular date--because it's tied to a holiday like this one, or because we want to pair it with a launch, or for any other reason, we have to start the request process far in advance to get the content ready in time to release when we want it to.

Once we have the clearances, the actual production time is pretty predictable, so it's just a matter of whether the clearances come in time for us start work in time to hit that date. If we hadn't gotten the clearances in time, we would have released something else. The other scenario you mentioned, where we just look at the list of cleared songs and see if we can put something together out of it, has also happened, but not as often. Usually, the releases you see each week are the results of months of advanced planning.

[The_Working_Man]

Interesting. I would have assumed someone dug through the list of approved songs and said "hey, here's some singles that go together, let's make a pack out of these."

As always, thanks for the insight, Jarred.

[TomKQT]

Yea, I also thank you for your detailed answer, Jarred. So it's usually completely intentional and prepared far in advance, that's interesting.

[JarredMcAdams]

Yea, I also thank you for your detailed answer, Jarred. So it's usually completely intentional and prepared far in advance, that's interesting.

Just to be clear, the songs we release aren't always the exact songs we would have chosen if we could take whatever we want. We have an idea for a release, we come up with several songs that would work and we request those, then based on what clears, we finalize the song selection. We don't always get the songs we want. There's actually a lot of fluidity to it, because there are so many factors we can't control. But this, somewhat paradoxically, means we do MORE planning, because we have to have contingency plans depending on how things play out.

[TomKQT]

Sure, I didn't even think you would get all the songs you wanted. That was even a big factor in my original question - how do you do the themed packs considering how uncertain and unpredictable the licencing process is.

[thequickmind]

This has been something I've been curious about. How often do you "farm" the requests? Is there a certain time period that you let them build up, and then you go and pull all of the data at one time, or is it a different process? I was also curious if you see an uptick in requests for an artist after they get a pack. For example, after the Soundgarden pack was released, I requested a whole bunch of other Soundgarden songs that I would love to see in game. I am interested to see if there's a correlation there.

[JarredMcAdams]

This has been something I've been curious about. How often do you "farm" the requests? Is there a certain time period that you let them build up, and then you go and pull all of the data at one time, or is it a different process? I was also curious if you see an uptick in requests for an artist after they get a pack. For example, after the Soundgarden pack was released, I requested a whole bunch of other Soundgarden songs that I would love to see in game. I am interested to see if there's a correlation there.

We've actually been revisiting some of our backend processes with regard to the request data. We used to grab the data every couple of months. Now we're working on a system that can update request data in real time - or at least update daily.

I haven't noticed the kind of correlation you mentioned, with an uptick for a band after its DLC is released, but I haven't really been looking for it either. The numbers are so large, it'd have to be a pretty big swing to be noticed.

[thequickmind]

Thanks for the response Jarred! This whole process is fascinating to me.