Fortnite Festival's potential...in the eyes of a music exec.
Go to section 4 if you don’t want to read my whole deeper dive. Don’t say I don’t think of you!
Being a gamer myself, I find myself swimming in the backlog of games I’ve had downloaded and sitting in my library, just waiting for a moment of inspiration or influence to lead me to actually play the game. It’s another story to see how long I’ll play it too. How often does this bout of inspiration come around? Rarely. Especially now that I’m working a full time job, I instead I only hear about other people’s fun. Secondly, new games are more expensive these days, so I usually wait a bit for them to be reduced before playing them. I end up sitting back and seeing the reactions before experiencing the game most of the time. That’s still interesting to me, okay?
Having started this Substack and Epic Games dropping one of the most seen gaming events in Fortnite’s history, and that Fortnite is free to play - I went to investigate first hand. To remind you what this is about, Fortnite dropped 3 big game partnerships across 3 consecutive days - Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing and then Fortnite Festival. I’m going to dive into Fortnite Festival and how it plans to incorporate music…from a music exec’s perspective.
How I’m going to split this investigation:
The actual experience.
Track choices and what that means.
The potential of the Jam Stage.
Predictions for future music x gaming.
1. The actual experience.
There are 2 main parts of Fortnite Festival - the Main stage, which is performance focused, and the Jam Stage which is more community focused and experimental (I’ll go into that later).
Without a tutorial in sight, I went straight into the ‘Main Stage’ event knowing full well I was going to bomb my first performance as I didn’t know the controls, and get laughed at by strangers. Fortunately you don’t get booed off stage in this game, your audio part gets silenced instead which is a rather polite way of telling me that I shouldn’t be there. Once I figured out the buttons, I smashed easy mode and then moved upwards, obviously. As the difficulty went up, I suffered from a little ‘stage fright’ as I was trying to play some guitar solo from an Epic Games’ track I had not heard before, but we got there.
As predicted - it was basically Guitar Hero but with one less button to press. You can choose your own instrument, which doesn’t affect the gameplay. My guess is that making the easier difficulties ultra easy, and the harder difficulties very hard, makes this accessible for all devices and all levels of users. The unique selling point here is having your avatar, which users have no doubt built an attachment to over time and various other game modes and sub-games like this, using a fresh reworking of game mechanics from titles from their younger years like Rock Band.
As soon as I logged in, I noticed the user numbers for the 3 new game modes and wanted to compare them. Here were the active players when I logged in on Sunday afternoon - the official day of Fortnite Festival launch:
Fortnite Festival - Main Stage: 222.7k
Fortnite Festival - Jam Stage: 60k
Rocket Racing: 318.k
Lego Fortnite: 1.7m
Battle Royale: 900k
As you can tell, Lego Fortnite has significantly more players, almost double the main Battle Royale game mode. This is expected - Lego is a huge brand that has consistently delivered fantastic games in their franchise as well as having a long lasting attachment with the childhood of even my era (90’s). This game mode was the first of the 3 sub-games to be released and is a much more complex one. Given Fortnite Festival’s simplicity and limited track selection, it wouldn’t surprise me if it has an element of ‘burnout’ to it.
From a gaming perspective, how would you keep users coming back? But from a music perspective, how would you get users to become fans of the artist/music? Building in parallel rewards that transfer over to the other game modes (cosmetics etc.) would be a key incentive for the game. The descriptions heavily suggested there would be more tracks added soon, which is the most obvious lure. The incentive of completing ‘daily’ achievements for this game can keep users playing (and tracks getting exposure) but how would Epic get users to interact further with the artists and music? Given the game mode’s malleability, smaller incentives or mechanics can be added to give real ultra context to something that is happening in real life with that artist, perhaps for a tour or an album launch. One potential idea is to have users play along to live shows if templates for tracks already exist and there is beats per minute (BPM) matching, giving an opportunity for a real digital live show attendance.
2. Track choices and what that means.
There is a common thread with most of the bigger tracks currently available on here: The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, All-American Rejects, DNCE, Imagine Dragons, Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo - They are all tracks owned by Universal Music Group, so it’s likely Epic Games has a deal with them.
The Jam Tracks are rotated daily. Which is quite a lot! But fear not - don’t shed a tear for those clearances teams at Epic Games just yet. It is likely they have a whole catalogue deal given the range of tracks that have been made available from Universal. The full tracklisting is here. There is a variety of songs from Bell Biv Devoe’s ‘Poison’ (1990) to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ (2023).
I thought that it would be an exclusive deal from Universal too given the sheer number of Universal tracks here, but there were a couple of exceptions: First exceptions are the Epic Games original tracks which are likely created and owned by Epic Games, so I’ll not discuss those. There’s also WitchGang’s ‘Nothing’s Alright’ (Self-owned), Sub Urban’s ‘Cradle’ (Warner) and Toto’s ‘Africa’ (Sony). What are these tracks doing here, side by side with the vast number of Universal tracks?! If I were Universal I would have tried my best to max out the market share and told everyone else to ‘swivel’.
I know Sub Urban’s viral sensation ‘Cradles’ was on Just Dance 2024, out only 6 months prior to Fortnite Festival, along with Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’. I know Toto’s ‘Africa’ has featured on many games too and is one of the greatest songs of all time. WitchGang appear to be self-signed to their own entity, have very few followers and very little media presence, with this being the second track they have released. I have also seen WitchGang’s TikTok bio description:
“WitchGang is a musical group made of analog and digital people.“
There is one thing they both have in common - when I went to search their tracks on the PRS database to see who wrote these songs, they don’t appear. I can’t seem to find any songwriting information that could tie them either back to Epic Games or Universal. It could be that these artists are in talks to be signed to Universal, or that the Universal x Epic Games deal isn’t exclusive, but these anomalies are very interesting to see. WitchGang is the most fascinating exception to me, as it has very little online presence. This alludes to it being made of fictional people. Is this a trial to see how much influence Fortnite Festival has on emerging artists, its attempt to quantify it, and therefore present or sell the opportunity? Hmm…
It is a shame they don’t have Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ on their tracklisting, because we all know it would absolutely slap. Someone get 16-Inch Records on the phone right now.
3. The potential of the Jam Stage
I investigated both the Main Stage and the Jam Stage and particularly enjoyed the layout of both of them. The Main Stage is performance-focused, but the Jam Stage is more community-focused and experimental, having a huge amount of underutilised potential in my opinion.
IGN described what you can do here better than I will, but long story short: you have a whole area dedicated to creating ad-hoc mashups using specific instrument loops from tracks you have (our fellow music execs will know these as ‘stems’) with other loops that your friends own. You can do this live with your party or nearby players and also change the loop, key and tempo.
IGN also used the below line which cracked me up:
“Fortnite Festival will feature all sorts of songs from different artists in the future, cycling out songs and updating the playlist. For players worried about DMCA risks, there’s a specified amount of time for each licensed track so you should be safe during that time.”
Classic. Glad we’re safe! Phew.
You can tell this area is mainly focused around community - look on the smiles on their faces. Aww.
It is designed with genres in mind. There are 4 corners that all have their own ‘feel’ - a megaplex shopping centre area, an abandoned warehouse area, an open-air, festival-esque area and a classic venue with an underground performance club within it.
From my experience, when an artist delivers their music to the world, it is rare that they would allow other artists to remix their work and commercially release it without their consent or review. These kind of considerations are everywhere and often written into agreements too, which would have been written pre-Fortnite. Also, artists have preferences, and may not want to be associated with political stuff, or violence. How would you monitor what loops can be performed with other loops? So getting catalogue music track loops to be remixed by Fortnite players on the fly may be tricky…But this presents a real opportunity for emerging artists as long as you’re not fussy.
If an emerging artist was to deliver a track that was built in mind to have cool and unique sounding loops to be used in this exact way, they could really take ownership over this section. Big producers that might lean into this include Marshmello and Steve Aoki, but I think there is a real opportunity for emerging artists to get stuck in here and make a name as a collaborative partner.
Going back to the design of the area, in-between the 4 areas of the Jam Stage setting, there were several abandoned shops and stores, ranging from pizzerias, ice cream shops to merch shops and vending machines. The feel was how a typical ‘rags to riches’ rockstar cliche setting would begin, but cleaned up dramatically to appeal to all ages, as you can imagine.
Adding context to these remix areas by making them thriving hangouts, with purchasing options and deeper, ‘career mode’ aspects of remixing and performing live, could really shine a light on this mode. In an ideal scenario, your avatar would play along in bigger and better venues with their ‘own’ music, but they are actually performing music from an emerging artist. Think of Virtual Self on Beat Saber, which was actually Porter Robinson in disguise.
My small-ish prediction here is that there will be a streamer who will gather together a few complicit followers to create a mashup of tracks live on stream. This clip will do particularly well on Tiktok, and it will stay on TikTok only, because that remix will never get approved for public release through streaming services or beyond. If that isn’t proof of concept that the context of music is of similar importance to how ‘good’ something sounds, I don’t know what is. *cough* crazy frog *cough* Bitch Lasagna *Cough*
4. Predictions for future music x gaming
Let me list out some of the things I’ve said above so it’s easier to read.
Epic Games need to figure out how to keep users coming back authentically without ‘incentives’. They could open the door to deeper contextual additions to tracks or cosmetics, or even show play-a-longs with live broadcasts. Because all music companies care about is the conversion to becoming a fan of the artist. Rightfully. So there.
Fortnite Festival has at least one questionably-independent artist on its tracklisting. I reckon it’s a trial run to see what impact inclusion has on the artist. Keep an eye on WitchGang.
The Main Stage is great for competitive play, but the Jam Stage has serious potential for community, experimentation and exposure for creators and players alike. I’d love to see shops fill out and a narrative / ‘career mode’ setting that mirrors an emerging artist’s music and story (context, see? all makes sense).
TLDR:
Fortnite Festival is a fun exploration of music with big potential. Mostly Universal tracks = likely partnership. There is one indie artist - I reckon it’s a test to measure exposure. Fortnite Festival should have a career mode. Toto’s ‘Africa’ is the best decision made in this sub-game.
Side news in the latest week too:
GTA 6 trailer dropped. Yeah.
Baldur’s Gate 3 won Game Of The Year award. Having personally played it, it was no surprise and I called it within the first few hours. I do feel sorry for Spiderman 2 not winning anything, but I am saddened to see the amount of people having not heard of Baldur’s Gate 3 and being shocked that it won. I’m not an Astarion-simp either, so don’t call me out.