So.....This Is Bad News, Right? (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, February 11, 2022, 20:32 (1040 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I expect there is a lot of Work for Hire and employee work product issues here too, but yeah all of this is useless speculation without seeing the contracts.

The article has relevant info.

O'Donnell and Salvatori dispute this. "It was never work-for-hire," O'Donnell said. "It was always a licence deal. So that's what we did with Halo. With the first Halo music ever, that was written and recorded in 1999 for the first time. It was licensed to Bungie. Bungie didn't get bought by Microsoft for over a year."

"That's when that first new contract came in, where we were like, 'Yes, we will sign over the publishing rights and the copyright on this music for Halo to Microsoft.' However, I wanted to do it the way it's done in movies and television, where the composers are still ASCAP composers, and it's not a pure work-for-hire. There is a contract for any ancillary royalties - so use in commercials, use in anything outside the game, specifically, or sales of soundtracks.

O'Donnell said he and Salvatori have received royalties from Microsoft on a quarterly basis over the years, but the payments were not connected to accounting that showed, for example, how many units were sold, or any deals done.

The ongoing lawsuit is, according to O'Donnell, currently about working out exactly how much money is potentially owed before settling on a dollar amount for damages. It is not, O'Donnell insisted, a claim of ownership over the Halo music.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-02-10-original-halo-music-composers-threaten-to-try-to-block-tv-show-amid-law...

I have no idea what is true or not in this situation, but everything here strikes me as believable at the very least. Far as I know, most video game soundtracks are just considered part of the game like any other asset. Most people who write music for games don’t retain ownership of the recordings or retain ownership of the composer rights. But Marty and Michael being music industry guys would more than likely have approached a relationship with Bungie differently. Licensing their music to Bungie would absolutely have been the best thing for them to do. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Microsoft just assumed they were getting full ownership of the music, just like they did with all other game assets.

What I find surprising here is that this situation has taken until now to come to a head. Back when Halo CE Anniversary came out, and it included a re-recorded versions of the main Halo theme, I wondered at the time if Microsoft went to the trouble of doing that so they could have a recording of the Halo theme song that they owned. Music licensing and royalty fees often track ownership of the recording itself and composer credits separately. So every time one of my songs gets played on Spotify, I get a payment for being the songwriter and another payment for being the owner of that specific recording (fractions of a penny per play, but whatever). So I’d assumed using a new recording of the Halo theme would allow Microsoft to save some money… they’d still need to pay Marty and Michael some royalties as the original composers, but it would prevent the pair from “double dipping” and claiming royalties as the owners of the recording as well. But clearly this isn’t the case, if the article above is to be believed. This all sounds as if Microsoft has been acting like they straight up own the music this whole time, which is frankly crazy (certainly within the realm of possibility, but that depends of the details of contracts that none of us have access to).