Background music for games

The machine appeared with the arcade game Pong in 1972. A simple table tennis simulator, where a small square ball moves around the screen to be beaten or not beaten by a player with the goal of winning a victory point, he not only became the first commercially successful video game in history, but also marked the beginning of a new gaming empire of interactive entertainment. And last but not least this happened thanks to more than primitive background music, which had to raise the players ’sporting spirit with its sound, attracting everyone to the game to join such exciting interactive sports experiences. And she coped with this perfectly, opening up a new sphere of application for magical vibrations pleasant to the human hearing.

Years passed, and progress did not stand still. Previously, background music for games had to be recorded on phonograph records, bobbins and cassettes, but now the simple use of special program codes allows you to avoid such difficulties. One of the first here was the well-known game Pac-man. It was the mid-eighties, famous for their attempts at the first digitization of background music for games and all other sounds.

And the playing and music world would be overwhelmed by real chaos, if not for licenses that allowed the use of other people’s musical material as background music for games of their own production.

Music Licenses

The music industry, not accidentally being a multi-billion dollar business, is ready to receive huge money for tunes written decades ago. Therefore, transferring to your business the right to use these tunes on agreed terms, for example, as background music for games, it expects a corresponding payment. And here it is supported by the entire legislative arsenal of copyright protection in any country in the world.

To understand them in order to choose the background music you need for games is quite simple. They are:

Attribution – this music license will allow you to copy and distribute the background music you need for games on any medium and in any format. And also, relying on it, create remixes for any purpose, including commercial ones, with the obligatory condition of indicating the author of the work, providing a link to the license, and indicating changes, if any.

Share-alike – this license means that you have the right to distribute music, only under the rules of this license.

No Derivative Works – a license forbidding to modify the author’s music, if you still somehow transform the author’s material or take it as the basis for a derivative work, then you automatically lose the possibility of distribution.

Noncommercial – all the same, but without the right to commercial use.

Is it possible to get high-quality background music for games without violating copyright?

There are different ways to do this.

The first you will be the creation of suitable background music for games by yourself. The method is the simplest and completely free, because at the moment there are no licenses protecting the rights of those who taught you how to create all this.

The second way is the opportunity to use such music as the background music for games for which the protection period has expired.

And finally, the third is to use the services of special services and sites filled with background music, thoroughly protected by appropriate licenses to the mutual pleasure of authors and users.

The best solution, of course, is a royalty-free license. It is a type of licensed agreement that allows you to use almost any kind of music for commercial purposes and, what is important, to use the music an infinite number of times at a reasonable cost.

And as long as the pleasure of the player itself remains an inexhaustible motivation for spending personal time playing such unproductive activities, there will be an inexhaustible stream of more and more computer games, as well as the possibility of using background music for games.