SingStar: The Music

We try and license them for three months, and then we have another two months of production time to try and make them SingStar-able. But you don't always get that three months, for whatever reason - part of SingStar is an opportunity as well. An opportunity arises with a certain artist or certain festival in a territory, for example, and you've got to go for it.

We do have quite a strict evaluation process, because some songs would be great from a marketing or fanbase perspective, but actually... a good example would be Around the World by Daft Punk - it's a great track, it would do really well for us in France, but the lyrics is the same line for about 80 times.

Another example might be that George Michael/Elton John duet of Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me. On paper it sounds fantastic - two really good artists, good SingStar-able artists as well, a duet, really nice... but there's a 1-minute instrumental, and one person doesn't sing for 3 minutes, so you're just stood there looking like a lemon with the microphone.

So we have evaluation, and there are others - one video featured a singer that had a knife, so we just made a small video edit, and got approval from the artist. That just means then that the PEGI rating is all fine. For the sake of half a second, we can make the edit, and we want to keep the PEGI rating at 12.

Sometimes, if a video is just full of killing people we'd never be able to edit it, but in a lot of cases a small edit to something is possible.

If a song is related to a film, you get into much more complex licensing, because getting hold of the video rights and the actors in the video - it won't be owned by the label.

The main thing there is that unless you're a big company, like Microsoft or Sony, you don't get an audience with these people. It's getting easier because of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, people are seeing that there's money in it and they can't afford to ignore it - particularly because the music industry is going through a tough time.

So we're getting more interest now, but when we first started - it was really hard... and probably only the Sony cheque book that made it interesting for them.

I think back then we were more pedantic about the "karaoke" word. We explained that the experience we were creating was different from karaoke because we wanted to use the real videos.

I remember having a conversation with somebody who asked how we managed to get the publishing rights - which is the notes on the page - and the master rights. Because karaoke just pays the publishing, as it's re-played by somebody. They assumed it'd be double costs, but in fact the people who were associated with the tracks, the writer and performer - it might be the same person, it might be different - actually prefer us presenting us with the real, aspirational master version. Because for them, the karaoke version sounds a bit cheap, so they kind of don't want to do the deal. Whereas using their recording and video puts the song in its best possible light - so we spun that around a little bit, and that definitely helped us.

It was kind of an eggshell approach though, wasn't it? Because they thought the more it was to do with them, the more it belonged to them, so actually we should be paying them significant amounts of money to do it because otherwise we wouldn't have a product.

On the other hand we could have just done a karaoke thing, and they felt that, so there was this kind of dance - who would be making the most money? We all agreed that as long as it was fair, then it was okay.