Music Industry’s New Revenue Stream: Videogame-App Makers

Record labels and publishers strike deals with SongLily, a licensing platform 

A game developer recently paid SongLily $1,440 to license ‘Ace of Spades’ by metal band Motörhead. Photo: Joel Ryan/Associated Press

The music industry has identified a rare constituency willing to pay handsomely for music in the digital age: videogame-app makers.

In recent months, major record companies and publishers have struck agreements with a startup called SongLily, a music-licensing platform aimed at videogame and mobile-app builders. There are about 19 million of these software developers world-wide, according to Evans Data’s 2016 Global Developer Population and Demographic Study.

The deals allow SongLily to offer some of the labels’ well-known songs to game and app developers for an annual flat fee, currently about $1,440 per major-label song, for up to 100,000 app downloads or unique registered players.