Session: Hit Music In UA-Unpacking the Impact of Commercial Hit Music In Mobile Games - T. Jenneborg

Heat. Heat. Hi guys. Uh my name is Thomas Bori and I'm the CEO of Reactional Music. Uh I'm going to talk about hit music in UA and I'm going to share a little bit of insights of course started with the background of reaction music but I'm going to share a little bit of insights of what we're doing and uh how to deal

with you know hit music uh the challenges with that in general and then Junas is my colleague over here is going to help me with a live presentation and then we're going to share some results and takeaways. Uh just a quick note, I don't see the time here, so that would be helpful. Okay, good. Thanks. Um yeah, so reaction music uh we unlock popular music for games and um our team has extensive background both from the gaming industry, music industry and different tech companies. And the top four people you see here are participating here today. So feel free to come by and say hi to us. and we are located in uh Sweden and UK. So the opportunity here that we talk about we treat music as a performance engine and what do we mean mean by that?

I mean we did this test a few months ago where we actually tested a really popular track called Return of the Mac. I don't know if you guys heard about it. Has roughly 650 million streams. Uh quite popular songs around 90s. And we tested that song with a mediumsiz game publisher. And was a quite small test, roughly two weeks, so not that big of a sample, but you know, over 100,000 impressions, so still good enough. And we clearly saw a pretty high install uplift. uh we saw that music really performed and we thought that that was really interesting. And then we looked at this on a macro level where we all know that UA is a $30 billion market and hit music has none of it which is crazy to me because you see hit music

everywhere except in gaming or in UA. You you have some music in gaming but not at all in UA. And we think that's really interesting because we see a real opportunity here on on a macro level and we need to solve that on a micro level as well. So we try to understand why doesn't it work? Why why hasn't anyone anyone done this before? But yeah, but if you dealt with the music industry, you clearly know that it's a pain. It's a pain to deal with the music industry. And first of all, licensing here can take months and you you you don't get any clear timeline when when anything's going to be solved. Like when is this going to be clear? Share a time plan with me, please. No answers. Okay, cool. Then of course the legal. So much legal and this the lawyers are specialized in this. So this also super expensive because they're specialized US lawyers. That's really expensive.

And then if you're like a UA person, you work on based on data. So thank you. You do all your, you know, all decisions are databased. And uh here the music industry is asking you to make a pretty big commitment up front and you have nothing to, you know, well, we don't we don't like that in general. That's the issue, right? We we we we okay with paying what we norally want to pay, dollar per dollar, right? So again, if you look at this on a macro level, it makes a lot of sense. We have a $30 billion market. That's a huge amount of money. And if it performs, most of the people here are willing to pay. That's no problem. But to convince each individual label about that, that's that's that's a pain really. But that's what we've been doing the last few months. And with the first test, I'm going to share a bare bone about both more model later, but we saw that it drives more installs. Uh we are thinking

of providing game publisher with a basket of tracks so they can choose different tracks and see which one performs. And then the payment is going to be based on performance. We're currently doing that with a few game publishers. So we treat these game publishers more as a partners rather than customers um because they're really helping us. They really believe in this idea. And what we can see here so far is that I mean we can't tell the names of all of them but here we have a casual puzzle giant with roughly a $300 million UA budget based on third party resources. I mean I haven't asked them directly but based on internet you can see that level. The second one mediumsiz game publisher and like $35 million UA budget. The third one is a racing game. Uh I wouldn't call it that indie but quite smaller very

popular game though. And the fourth one is a social casino game that um yeah has a big budget as well. Uh could you just go back uh sorry and also was to say that we're doing this test together with them and uh they're sharing all the data regarding how these songs are performing to help us understand the commercial value of what we're doing and I think that's really cool of them because they could easily just paid and not share anything with us but that's not how we're doing it. We're actually doing this together and also having active discussions with tons of labels on the music side. The songs we're currently testing uh in this new test that we're doing with these four game publishers, it's just two songs. That's Kids in America with King Wild and the reason for that is that we're doing the test in the US and one of the games is really focusing on the target audience is women, 35 years old, etc. And we thought that this song really works for that. And the second

song that we're testing is Million Voices with uh Auto No. Um when you hear it, you you really get the catchy thing like hey, I'm not going to sing but but still you you will recognize that song. Uh and the first one that we did was Return of the Mac. That's really really po. And again, so what we're giving to the game publisher, we're giving them access to these songs which they can use for UA and everything is cleared um and matching through the audience. And the songs that we're looking for, well, it's not a hard cap, but we're looking for songs for over 250 million streams and above. And uh we're looking for songs from the 80s till today and match them to each game. That's the main thing here. But yeah, I think that you want to see the solution. U but the game publisher that we're going to share, they they actually let us to share their information here. So we think it's really cool of them to let us do that. And again, they've been really really

helping us. So the first thing you will see here is a playable that they have given us, the original playable that is live in different platforms and it's a top performing playable. And the second part in the video will be our playable that is live right now. I think you might recognize the game. This is the original music. Tasty.
You know life is cruel. life to make a new story in America. Everybody

before I leave over to Junas here as you saw um we are not just adding music we're doing different effects that is sync with the music. So I'm going to share how this is being done. So Jonas, over to you.
Hello everyone. Hello. Hello. Yes, this works. Hi. I'm Jonas. Uh I'm from Goththingberg, Sweden. I'm turning 40 in five weeks. And I'm going to show you uh a quick preview of our uh for now uh in-house solution or like internal solution. Um, so this will be first showcasing what you just saw. Uh, and I can just quickly show you how it works. And um, uh, let's hit preview here. So now the playable loads. Uh,

essentially uh, you can drop in any HTML playable here and we'll be able to work with it. So, here you have some um um settings that I've put to it and uh I can swap between different presets. So, uh when they're singing with the kids, then it's this preset and it's all dancing together, etc. And these are all then sequenced together. And in order to affect something, we will pick like brightness in this palette. And then we can target a specific uh thing here like the blue candy. And then you can preview it instantly. Uh but if you want to, you can then say I want this to happen on uh every four beats instead. Or you could have it go uh like follow the vocal melody if you want. for instance.
There you have it.

Uh and uh let's pick a clean slate here with a different track. So again we have the scene here completely uh basic as it was and then we can pick say scale transform target the logo. Uh, let's pump that up every four beats. So, uh, several versions for the same song and then we can batch export them all out to different ad networks and

deliver like a big uh batch of files for the uh uh publisher to test. And that is in a nutshell how this tool works. Thanks. So again, how does it work? As you saw here, first we have prepare all the hit tracks as you saw in the library there. And what we do, we have different types of metadata, edit the songs, etc. So they're all prepared. Then you guys or the game publisher gives us their HTML file which we upload into our injector tool and we modify everything and make it ready for the networks. pretty easy. Um difficult tech technology but now pretty easy for us. Uh the engine is the music engine behind it's patented and uh we handle all the payments to the music side. So it's pretty easy for you guys to try it out. Next slide.

And you guys probably wanted to know about the test results. And during our te first test, we saw an install uplift on 75% uh which is a pretty strong signal and a CPR reduction of 35%. Uh of course we treat this more as a signal because the data set was quite small but a quite impressive signal and that's why we're doing more tests right now with the four game publishers that we mentioned for a longer time period on more channels etc. And uh what we can see so far, we got the question especially from the music side about wait a minute like is it the music or is it the technology that drives this extra installs right? So we're testing that as well. So we're doing something called version one which is the ad with music on top and then we're doing the reaction powered version and the reaction powered version so far is getting a clickthrough rate more than 30% and roughly double the span versus the music only ad. So, still a positive

signal, but we're doing this test right right now and we're hoping to get the end results within two months somewhere there. So, the early signal is that the sync, not just the song, drives the lift, even though that the music part is actually better than the baseline. Next one. So, the takeaways here is that hit music moves installs. We've seen that and I think that's not a surprise for anyone. If music was for free, everyone would have done this long ago. Uh but think music beat static. I think that's quite cool that actually the effects that you saw really drives engagements and installs etc. And uh we think that you should test music like everything else even if it's a hassle. Um there's some kind of economics behind this and we can see that on macro level and it makes sense on micro level as well. It's just a pain right now that we're trying to solve for you guys.

Uh yeah. So thanks. That's that's it. Thank you very much. That I mean honestly I think there's something about you know I couldn't help myself. You know Kids in America I takes me straight back and I I am old enough to remember that coming out. Um or am I? Maybe it's a bit even earlier than me. Maybe a bit earlier than me maybe. Yeah Simon knows what I'm talking about. Uh anyway, so I mean there's something there something magical about the connection, the emotional visceral connection that happens when you have something you can recognize and is of a quality. But but I also remember when I was at PlayStation Home where the uh PS wanted me to pay them 6% of Sony's total revenue to put music into PlayStation Home. My response was not something I can repeat and we decided to not have any music at all in PlayStation Home and instead people used

their microphones and just let put their microphone near a radio and that was all good. So things have clearly moved a huge distance. So my question there is a question here honest my question is how how much easier is it now to work with music companies? Have they actually understood the true value of their material as opposed to their historic overvaluation? I would argue. Does that make sense?
No, I think we still have the same problem as before. Um, you know, we got friends in the music industry that's helping us, but we have even also the opposite I would say. Uh, people people really like their sync fees, upfront payments, the guarantees, etc. So that's one of the reasons why this hasn't worked yet and we're just trying to educate the game publishers and uh also on the music side right solders etc. But I also understand them there there are some other restraint restrictions

such as uh you know they want to have creative control which is also bit difficult for UA because you're testing a lot of things and you can't have the communication ongoing all the time. So we're building a system for that to handle that type of questions. Of course if we were giving game publishers access to let's say a few hundred songs. Uh of course on the music side I can say I don't want to be in a game with violence or whatever and we'll be also limited for a time period.
No I can and I I should for full disclosure I'm also an adviser for a group called Audio Mob that specifically do audiobased advertising. So, and the reason why I think that's relevant here is that although they're doing something very different from you, what they're doing is allowing you to carry on playing with the um the promotional context being in the background audible and listenable. And I think this to me is the same principle. It's like I'm getting to have the I can play, I can continue. And I think that we underestimate the power that at our

peril.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I mean we see we see more engagement and if we got more engagement we basically have higher lifetime value in our customers or players. So I mean on a high level this makes total sense. I think that everyone in the rooms agrees with that especially if music was free everyone would have used it. Now we just have to teach people that this makes economic sense and we know that it does econom it makes economic sense on a macro level but uh you know on a master side it could be 10 different stakeholders and on the publishing side might be 15 for a specific track that's that can get quite messy pretty pretty fast.
It certainly can. It certainly can. So on that note I'm going to say thank you very much. Um, round of applause, please.