Steve Schnur can’t sleep. He calls it a blessing and a curse.
In search of the next great sports video game soundtrack, Schnur scrolls through social media in the middle of the night, discovering new music and sending it to his long-sleeping colleagues.
That’s how he found Lola Young.
While scrolling through Instagram one morning last November, Schnur, the president of music at Electronic Arts, came across Young’s raspy, soulful voice. “Holy…you know what,” » he thought and immediately sent a text message to Cybele Pettus, EA’s senior music supervisor.
Two days later, they attended a Los Angeles rooftop party where three emerging musicians performed in front of a crowd of industry veterans. A young British girl came out with long dark hair, choppy bangs and nose rings. The same singer-songwriter Schnur had texted Pettus at 3 a.m.
“We literally fell in love with her,” Pettus said. “She was so engaging, so interesting, such a storyteller with her music. We went straight to her, told her how much we loved her set – which was like three songs – and met her manager. At the time, she had very recently been signed to a label…I don’t even think her record was finished.
Schnur and Pettus wanted it for EA Sports FC 25, the latest edition of the popular soccer game. Young does not play video games or follow sports outside of the World Cup. But she knew it was a big deal. His song “Flicker of Light” is nestled among 117 songs by artists from 27 countries.
“It’s interesting because it’s a pretty male-dominated game, but there are a lot of women playing it. It’s exciting for me to be in the game because I’m a female artist doing my thing,” Young said.
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Not all songs are born from chance encounters on rooftops. But Schnur’s path to Young is emblematic of the modern effort to create a fresh, quality video game soundtrack.
To organize such a large collection of varied pieces, you have to be attentive to what is going to happen. be the following signature song rather than just taking the pulse of what’s already topping the charts or going viral on TikTok. At EA, Schnur challenges his team to a musical scavenger hunt with one rule: Don’t listen to the radio or any other major network where music is played.
“I don’t want the influence of what happens today to influence what happens in the next six months,” Schnur said. “You can’t title a game ‘Madden 25’ and make it look like 2023. It has to be, as a matter of design, a place of discovery, a place that cements what next year will look like. A place where the sport itself will be part of that sound.
To achieve this, Schnur and his fellow researchers travel the world in search of new pieces. They attend concerts by emerging artists, take into account suggestions from current athletes and applications from the biggest names in the industry.
Everyone from Green Day to Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas want to know what they have to do to get featured in wildly popular video games. In the case of the former, that meant playing “American Idiot” on acoustic guitars for Schnur to lobby for his placement on Madden 2005. In the latter, Schnur got to hear Eilish’s new album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” before it was completed because the nine-time Grammy winner wanted to be part of FC 25. Eilish’s “CHIHIRO” appears in the game.
Album previews and concert tickets are perks, but the job also comes with some pressure. Curating a video game soundtrack means creating a playlist that millions of people will hear, over and over again. Avid gamers will remember the music for better or worse. And the best ones are remembered even decades later, when a song immediately evokes memories of a game, a time and a place.
The teams responsible for piecing together the soundtracks are well aware that their work will live on as virtual time capsules once a current game is replaced by a future iteration, but they strive to ensure that the initial experience is a introduction to new sounds rather than recognition. old favorites.
“The sound of the NFL to a 20- or 25-year-old is very different from their parents, because the tone associated with football comes from Madden,” Schnur said. “It doesn’t come from broadcasts or live football matches. This comes from the virtual experience. With that comes a huge responsibility to get it right and know that you are defining the sound of the sport going forward.
This is something that David Kelley, the director of music partnerships and licensing at 2K, takes into account when selecting songs for the NBA2K franchise.
“The most important thing for us is that we want it to always be forward-looking. We want it to sound like something you’ve really never heard before,” he said.
A 2K artist selected for its 2025 installment, released on September 3, was as forward-looking as possible.
In June, 310babii, an 18-year-old rapper from Inglewood, California, received his high school diploma and a platinum plaque on the same day for his single “Soak City (Do It).” A 2K enthusiast, he jumped at the chance to secure a coveted spot on the soundtrack. He wrote and recorded “forward, back,” a basketball-inspired track, exclusively for NBA2K25 and hopes to hear it when the game shows replays of LeBron James diving on other players.
In the same way that millennial gamers equate Madden 04 with Blink-182 and Yellowcard or return to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, 310babii associates NBA2K episodes from his childhood with the featured artists.
“For me, 2K16 is one of my favorites. When I was in fifth grade, I remember DJ Khaled had the craziest songs. That’s what made this game special to me, aside from the gameplay itself,” he said. “For a 10-year-old, my song could be that for them.”
At EA and 2K, the rating process for a game begins the day after the previous edition launches. Understanding how songs flow together to create a mood is just as imperative as choosing the individual tracks.
“You’re a bit like a DJ in a club. You can have a great set, and then if you play a song that feels out of place, you’ll lose the whole audience and you’ll have to rebuild that trust,” Kelley said. “It’s something we take very seriously.”
Creating authentic sound means shaping the soundtrack to fit the sport. This doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on a particular genre, although hip-hop, rap, R&B and pop tracks are frequent choices, but it does mean focusing on what athletes and fans listen to. Kelley said Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard and Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant even send in songs or artists for consideration.
For MLB: The Show, finding the right vibe might mean taking inspiration from players’ songs. Ramone Russell, PlayStation director of product development communications and brand strategy, said they tried to look more into the different cultures and ethnicities represented in the sport.
“We started having more Latin music, more reggaeton, a little bachata. We have to do it if we are faithful to the source material,” he said. “We’re creating a Major League Baseball game based on something that’s real. If in real life 40% of musicians are Latin and the music they listen to on average is Latin, our soundtrack should probably contain Latin music.
The team that created the MLB: The Show soundtrack receives about 50 albums a day from labels and publishers in hopes of including an artist’s track in the game, Alex Hackford said , director of music affairs at PlayStation Studios, in an email. Along with his partners at Sony Music, Hackford sends ideas to Russell’s team, who then decide what’s suitable for the game’s soundtrack.
The team is also creating a specific set of music for the game’s “Storylines” mode, which allows players to replay stories from baseball history. The songs in the Negro Leagues-centric “Storylines” mode were chosen solely by Russell, with the intention of expressing the darker aspects of baseball history through music.
“It’s not necessarily a happy story to tell, but what we’re trying to focus on here is what these men and women accomplished despite racism and Jim Crow.” » Russell said. “We do not fear the ugliness of this story, but we celebrate what these men and women accomplished despite these things. »
This is especially evident with the introduction of Toni Stone, the first woman to play regularly in a men’s major league, in MLB: The Show 24.
“When we decided to do Toni Stone, the first song that came to mind was ‘It’s Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ by James Brown. I was like, ‘That must be her intro song because she The nuance is there. It will just put people in the right frame of mind for the kind of story we’re telling because it’s still a man’s world, and it was still a man’s world. ‘men at the time,” Russell said. “But like James Brown said, nothing would be nothing without a woman. There’s this duality there that really helps tie it all together.
Through each new video game released year after year, these soundtracks cross sports and time to become cultural references. The songs tie the gaming experience to moments that go beyond scoring virtual touchdowns or launching animated home runs.
“No one remembers this unique piece of gameplay created in 2009,” Schnur said, “But everyone remembers the music.”
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / Athletics; (Photos: Kevin Mazur, Sean Gallup / Getty Images)