Steve Schnur can't sleep. He calls it a blessing and a curse.
In search of the subsequent great sports video game soundtrack, Schnur scrolls through social media in the midst of the night, discovers latest music, and sends it to his long-in-bed colleagues.
That's how he found Lola Young.
As Schnur, Electronic Arts' music president, was browsing Instagram one morning last November, he got here across Young's gravelly, soulful voice. “Holy…you know what?” he thought, immediately texting Cybele Pettus, EA's senior music supervisor.
Two days later, they attended a rooftop party in Los Angeles, where three aspiring musicians performed to a crowd of industry veterans. Out got here a young British woman with long dark hair, short 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 just so engaging, so interesting, such a storyteller together with her music. We went straight as much as her, told her how much we loved her set – which consisted of three songs – and met her manager. She had only recently been signed to a label on the time… I don't think her record was even finished yet.”
Schnur and Pettus wanted them for EA Sports FC 25, the latest edition of the hugely popular soccer game. Young doesn't play video games or play sports unless he's watching the World Cup. But she knew it was a big deal. Her song “Flicker of Light” is embedded in 117 songs by artists from 27 countries.
“It's interesting because it's quite a male-dominated game, but there are a lot of women who play it. “It's exciting for me to be in the game because I'm an artist doing my thing,” Young said.
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Not all traces arise from chance encounters on the roof. But Schnur's path to Young is emblematic of modern efforts to create a high-quality, fresh video game soundtrack.
To curate such an extensive collection of varied titles, you have to have an ear for what wants be that next Breakout song, rather than just having your finger on 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 a major station that plays music.
“I don’t want the influence of what is today to influence what will be in the next six months,” Schnur said. “You can't call a game 'Madden 25' and make it sound prefer it's 2023. It needs to be a spot of discovery for design reasons, a spot that defines what the subsequent 12 months goes to sound like.” A place of where the sport itself will be part of that sound.”
To achieve this, Schnur and his colleagues search the globe for new titles. They attend concerts by up-and-coming artists, accept suggestions from current athletes, and accept submissions 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 star in the wildly popular video games. In the former case, that meant playing “American Idiot” on acoustic guitars so Schnur could make a case for his placement on Madden 2005. In the second case, Schnur was able to hear Eilish's new album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” before it was finished because the nine-time Grammy winner wanted to be at FC 25. Eilish's “CHIHIRO” appears in the game.
Album sneak peeks and concert tickets are perks, but the job also comes with a certain amount of pressure. Curating a video game soundtrack means creating a playlist that millions will listen to – over and over again. Avid gamers will remember the music for better or for worse. And the best ones are remembered decades later, when a song instantly brings back memories of a game, a time and a place.
The teams responsible for putting together the soundtracks are keenly aware that their work will live on as virtual time capsules once a current game is replaced by a future iteration. However, they strive for the first experience to be an introduction to new sounds rather than an acknowledgment of old favorites.
“The sound of the NFL to a 20- or 25-year-old is very different than that of their parents because the sound they associate with football comes from Madden,” Schnur said. “It doesn’t come through broadcasts or live football matches. It 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 in the future.”
That's something David Kelley, the Director of Music Partnerships and Licensing at 2K, takes this into account when selecting songs for the NBA2K franchise.
“The most important thing for us is that we always want to be future-oriented. We want it to sound like something you’ve really never heard before,” he said.
One artist 2K chose for the 2025 episode, out September 3, was as forward-thinking as it gets.
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 hit single “Soak City (Do It).” As an avid 2K gamer, he took the opportunity 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 attacking other players.
Similar to how millennial gamers equate Madden 04 with Blink-182 and Yellowcard or draw on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, 310babii connects his childhood NBA2K episodes 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 there. That’s what’s special about this game for me, aside from the gameplay itself,” he said. “For a 10-year-old kid, my song might be right for them.”
At EA and 2K, the process of rating a game begins the day after the release of the previous edition. Just as important as selecting individual tracks is figuring out how the songs fit together and create a mood.
“You're kind of like a DJ in a club. You can have a great set and then when you play a song that feels out of place, you lose the entire audience and you have to rebuild that trust,” Kelley said. “This is something we take very seriously.”
To achieve an authentic sound, the soundtrack must be designed to fit the sport. That doesn't necessarily mean focusing on a specific genre, although hip-hop, rap, R&B and pop tracks are often chosen, but it does mean focusing on what athletes and fans are listening to. Kelley said Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard and Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant even sent songs or artists for consideration.
For MLB: The Show, finding the right atmosphere can mean taking inspiration from the players' walk-up songs. Ramone Russell, PlayStation Director of Product Development Communications and Brand Strategy, said they have tried to become more involved with the different cultures and ethnicities represented in the sport.
“We started playing more Latin music, more reggaeton, some bachata. We have to do that if we stay true to the source material,” he said. “We're making a Major League Baseball game based on something that comes from real life. In real life, if 40 percent of gamers are Latin American and the music they listen to on average is Latin music, our soundtrack should probably contain some Latin music.”
The team putting together the MLB: The Show soundtrack receives about 50 albums a day from labels and publishers hoping to bring an artist's track to the game, Alex Hackford, director of music affairs at PlayStation Studios, said in an email -Mail. Along with partners at Sony Music, Hackford sends ideas to Russell's team, who then decide what fits into the game's base soundtrack.
The team is also curating a special musical group for the game's “Storylines” mode, which allows players to re-enact tales from baseball's history. The songs for the “Storylines” mode, which focused on the Negro Leagues, were selected solely by Russell, with the intent of expressing the darker aspects of baseball history through music.
“It's not necessarily a happy story, 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 shy away from the ugliness of this story, but we celebrate what these men and women achieved despite all of these things. ”
This is particularly evident in 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 thing that came to mind was 'It's a Man's Man's Man's World' by James Brown. I'm like, “That should be their intro song since it's perfect.” The nuance is there. It just gets people in the right mindset for the kind of story we're telling. “Because it's still a person's world, and it was a person's world back then,” Russell said. “But as James Brown said, without a woman it would be nothing. There’s this duality that really helps hold everything together.”
With each new video game released year after year, these soundtracks weave across sports and through time, becoming cultural touchstones. The songs tie the gaming experience to moments that go beyond scoring virtual touchdowns or animated home runs.
“No one remembers the unique gameplay that came about in 2009,” Schnur said, “but everyone remembers the music.”
The Athletic;
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