Photo Credit: Naxos / Recreational Music
The world’s largest classical music label, Naxos, partners with Reactional Music to personalize music for gaming.
Interactive music personalization engine and delivery platform for gaming, Reactional Music, has agreed to a global licensing partnership with the world’s largest classical and regional music rights holder, Naxos. The partnership brings the world’s biggest classical music catalog to game developers and gamers.
Founded in 1987 by Klaus Heymann, Naxos comprises numerous companies, divisions, imprints, and labels covering classical, world, folk, jazz, and cultural music from across the world.
The Reactional Platform allows game developers to create interactive music soundtracks in games. It also enables music to be personalized within a game in real time by the gamer, becoming the soundtrack to the game, in key and in time with gameplay. Notably, it does not affect the master recording.
Naxos and Reactional have also confirmed that they are exploring a collaboration on the composition of interactive soundtracks, allowing composed music to be generated in real time around the gamer and gameplay.
The partnership significantly expands and diversifies Reactional’s music delivery portfolio for game developers around the world, while Naxos becomes the latest in a growing network of rights holder partners who will gain deeper access to game developers and the global gaming market.
“With 14,000 games released on PC, 8,000 on console, and thousands more on mobile each year, the diversity of games development across five continents is huge. The partnership with Naxos is important as it brings music scores from every region of the world together along with an incredible catalog of classical music,” says Reactional Music President David Knox. “Naxos has a vision and understanding of the transformations that are taking place and the new opportunities that now exist for creative and commercial use and consumption of music.”
“Our partnership with Reactional Music is incredibly exciting,” added Håkan Lagerqvist, CEO of Naxos Digital Services. “Reach and access into interactive and game developers and their customers and gamers is an important step for Naxos.”
“Game developers are everywhere. They should be able to more easily access music scores and tracks that are creatively and culturally diverse so they can create and explore without limitation,” Lagerqvist continues. “For gamers, Naxos brings a pallet of ideas and choice that can work in so many different worlds and interactive experiences.”
“Naxos will also explore how our composers’ work and our music catalogs can be enabled as full interactive game soundtracks. This is potentially incredible exciting. It is also a step towards enabling music to be used under license by creators, developers, and enablers in all areas of interactive.”
Reactional is pioneering commercial music to be enabled as an in-game purchase at scale for the first time. In a global games market worth $223.1 billion in 2023, in-game purchases totalled $125.7 billion, of which $72.5 billion was spent on cosmetic content and in-game personalization.
But music has so far only accounted for less than 0.01% of this spend. Changing consumption habits and an increase in personalization in all digital worlds means that spending on in-game personalization is predicted to grow to $100 billion by 2029, according to MIDiA Research Global Games Forecast.
Reactional Music has partnered with over 50 music rights holders worldwide over the past three years as it grows its music delivery platform catalog. This includes Beggars Group, Defected Records, Cherry Red Records, Hopeless Records, Hipgnosis Song Management, and leading production music groups like APM Music, Soundstripe, and Alibi.