By Ronnie Pye, founder of IQ Artist Management
When IQ Artist Management started — and we've been at this in one form or another for well over thirty years — the advice was consistent: get your artists into sync libraries, pursue film and TV placements, and build a playlist strategy.
I followed it. Religiously.
I spent weeks relearning how sync licensing actually works, what a music supervisor wants in a pitch, the differences between a master licence and a publishing licence. It's all useful. It is also a market with its own long-established power structures, and breaking into it cold is a lot harder than operating from within.
Then my team turned to the video game market. What the heck is going on there?!? We had to figure out how to break in, because all of a sudden, lots of artists are syncing their work here, scoring and developing partnerships. We started looking into it.
"Music, for an indie developer, is a product decision. It affects how the game feels, how it scores in reviews, how long players stay invested. It's not a line item to be trimmed. It's part of what they're shipping. It’s a really big part of the experience."
Here's what some of that research turned up.
The video game music market is valued at $1.91 billion in 2026, and is growing at 7.7% annually. It’s projected to reach $3.73 billion by 2035. Some analysts put the broader sync licensing market at a slightly higher growth rate of around 8.2%. So, while gaming isn't definitively outpacing film and TV sync, it's close enough that the direction is the same, and the market is large enough that the comparison stops mattering, pretty quickly.
Interestingly though, for indie studios specifically, the numbers are approachable in a way that film sync rarely is. Most independent developers budget $500–$2,000 per track for licensed music. That figure reflects something worth paying attention to.
Music, for an indie developer, is a product decision. It affects how the game feels, how it scores in reviews, how long players stay invested. It's not a line item to be trimmed. It's part of what they're shipping. It’s a really big part of the experience.
Film and TV sync have a well-worn process. There are music supervisors, sync agents, licensing portals, submission briefs, rate cards, and preferred supplier relationships that take years to build. It's opaque in its own way, but that opacity has a certain shape. You know roughly who the gatekeepers are, and you know what they want.
Gaming has none of that.
There is no standard submission process for indie game audio. No recognized agent relationship. No brief format. No portal where you register your catalogue and wait for enquiries. Yet, the market exists, the money exists, the demand exists. The kind of shared, standard infrastructure that connects one side of the creative industry to the other still hasn’t arrived yet.
I find it perplexing given how long games have been around and how popular they are in the commercial market. However, for managers who've spent years being locked out of film sync by relationships they don't have, the absence of gatekeepers isn't a problem. In fact, that's the point.
On April 16th in London, an event called Games Meets Music brings together gaming juggernauts Ubisoft, Supercell, PlayStation, and King, with music industry organisations PRS for Music, and The BPI. It’s a full day of sessions on music licensing, audio budgets, artist collaborations, and rights frameworks. The first session of the day is literally entitled "Demystifying the process of getting your music into games."
Read that again. An industry event, in 2026, that has to open by demystifying the process.
+Read more: "Guide to Sync Placement Publicity For Maximum Exposure"
That one session title tells you more about the state of this market than any data point does. The connections aren't being made naturally. So, people built an event to make them happen. And the fact that it sold out its debut year and is back for a second suggests the demand on both sides is absolutely genuine.
There is also something else that came up repeatedly in the research. Indie developers aren't waiting for a pipeline to appear. They're finding music themselves via Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and YouTube. Kind of like we all do. They approach artists directly, and hope the rights situation is as straightforward as the approach, so as not to derail the project. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't.
That's the gap a manager fills. Not by pitching to a music supervisor or getting on a preferred supplier list. By making it easy. A one-page licensing framework, clear splits information, a single point of contact who can confirm within 48 hours that the master and publishing are both clearable. For a developer on a tight timeline, that's not a small thing. It removes the main reason they'd walk away and use a production library track instead.
The value isn't creative. It's legal clarity, delivered quickly.
One of our artists at IQ Artist Management, Peshay had his track "Ronaldo" appear on FIFA Street in 2005. An EA Sports AAA release. That's a very different world to an indie developer browsing Bandcamp at midnight looking for something that fits their game's atmosphere.
What I also noticed, and didn't see addressed anywhere, is that catalogue artists are almost entirely absent from this conversation. The gaming sync world tends to talk about composers and bespoke scores. But indie developers aren't looking for a commissioned piece. They're looking for something that already exists and already feels right. That's a catalogue play. And it's one that most management companies aren't positioning their artists for.
Barry Burns of Mogwai is the headline conversation at Games Meets Music this year. Mogwai have been building an instrumental catalogue for nearly thirty years. Clearly, someone noticed.
April 16th sees the organizations that control how music gets valued, registered, and paid in this country actively showing up to a games industry event. That's not a signal about where this market is going. That's a signal about where it already is.
Most music managers aren't paying attention yet. The sync libraries are crowded, and super competitive. The film and TV routes are long, and the people who've been doing this for twenty years have those relationships locked down. Both sides of that market already know exactly who to call. And it isn't someone who started paying attention in the last year or so.
Gaming doesn't have that problem. Because the gatekeepers haven't arrived yet.
Maybe nobody thinks about starting a music management company thinking they'll spend three months researching video game audio budgets. But, maybe you should. Some of us already knew the AAA side of game sync and thought that was all we needed. The indie route is something else entirely, younger, less structured, and for that reason, more open and dare I say, exciting. It’s also a lot bigger than I expected.
Ronnie Pye is the founder of IQ Artist Management. He has spent thirty years in and around the music industry, with a detour through IT, a stint on the drum and bass circuit as an artist, and enough time on both sides of the fence to know which questions aren't being asked. In an industry renowned for pressure, he writes about the things that fall between the cracks.
