Steve Schnur can't sleep. He calls it both a blessing and a curse.
In search of the next great sports video game soundtrack, Schnur scrolls through social media in the middle of the night, discovering new music, and sending it to co-workers who've been asleep for a while.
That's how he found Laura Young.
While swiping through Instagram one morning last November, Schnurr, president of music at Electronic Arts, came across Young's raspy, soulful voice. “Oh my god…you know that, right?” With that in mind, he immediately texted Cybele Pettus, a senior music supervisor at EA.
Two days later, they attended a rooftop party in Los Angeles, where the three budding musicians performed in front of a crowd of industry veterans. A young British woman with long black hair, choppy bangs, and a nose ring emerged from outside. Fellow singer-songwriter Schnurr texted Pettus around 3 a.m.
“We literally fell in love with her,” Pettus said. “She was very charming, very interesting, and a storyteller through her music. We went to meet her in person and tell her how much we loved her set (which was about three songs) and told her manager We met. At the time, she had only recently signed to a label…I don't even think her record was finished.”
Schnurr and Pettus wanted to feature her in EA Sports FC 25, the latest version of the popular soccer game. Young doesn't play video games or play sports other than watching the World Cup. But she thought it was It's a big deal. Her song “Flicker of Light” is among 117 songs by artists from 27 countries.
“It's a pretty male-dominated game, but there are a lot of women playing as well, so it's interesting. I'm a female artist doing my job, so I'm excited to be in the game,” Young said.
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Not all traces are born from chance encounters on rooftops. But Schnur's path to Young is emblematic of modern efforts to build high-quality, fresh video game soundtracks.
Curating such a vast collection of different tracks requires an ear for what's coming. become Next It's not just about having a pulse on songs that are already topping the charts or going viral on TikTok, it's the songs that have broken out. At EA, Schnur challenges his team to a musical treasure hunt. The rule is to not listen to the radio or any major stations that play music.
“We don't want today's impact to have an impact over the next six months,” Schnurr said. “You can't title a game 'Madden 25' and make it sound like 2023. It has to be a place of design, a place of discovery, a place that solidifies what next year's sound will be like. This is where the sport itself becomes part of this sound.”
To accomplish this, Schnurr and his fellow song seekers scour the world for fresh tracks. They attend concerts by up-and-coming artists, receive suggestions from current athletes, and field submissions from the biggest names in the industry.
Everyone from Green Day to Billie Eilish to her brother, producer Finneas, wants to know what they have to do to star in the wildly popular video game. In the case of the former, that meant Schnurr playing “American Idiot” on acoustic guitar and lobbying for the song to be included in Madden 2005. In the latter case, Schnur was able to hear Eilish's new album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,'' before it was completed. The nine-time Grammy Award winner is eager to perform at FC25. Irish's “CHIHIRO” appears in the game.
Album previews and concert tickets are perks, but the job also comes with a certain amount of pressure. Curating a video game soundtrack means creating playlists that millions of people listen to over and over again. Avid gamers will remember this music for better or worse. And the best ones remain in the memory even decades later, when the songs immediately evoke memories of games and times and places.
The team responsible for creating the soundtrack are fully aware that their work will live on as a virtual time capsule even after the current game is superseded by future versions, but the first experience We strive to ensure that this is an introduction to new sounds rather than recognition. An old favorite.
“The NFL sounds a lot different for 20-, 25-year-old kids than it does for their parents because their association with football comes from Madden,” Schnurr said. “That's not something you get through broadcasts or live football. It comes from a virtual experience. That comes with a huge responsibility to get it right and understand that it's defining the sound of the sport going forward. Masu.”
It's about David Kelley. 2K's Director of Music Partnerships and Licensing takes into consideration when selecting songs for the NBA2K series.
“The most important thing for us is that we always want to be future-proof. We want our music to sound like something you've never really heard before,” he says. I did.
Tabbed into his 2025 release on September 3rd, one artist, 2K, couldn't have looked further into the future.
In June, 310babii, an 18-year-old rapper from Inglewood, California, collected his high school diploma and platinum plaque for his hit single “Soak City (Do It)” on the same day. An avid 2K player, he jumped at the chance to secure a coveted spot on the soundtrack. He wrote and recorded the basketball-inspired track “forward, back” exclusively for NBA2K25, which you can hear when a replay of LeBron James dunking on another player airs in a game. I want it.
In the same way that millennial gamers equate Madden 04 with Blink-182 and Yellowcard, or remember the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, 310babii is an artist whose work has been featured in his childhood NBA2K associate.
“For me, 2K16 is one of my favorites. I remember DJ Khaled having the craziest song when I was in fifth grade. That's what made that game for me, apart from the gameplay itself. “We made it special,” he said. “For a 10-year-old, my song might be his song.”
For EA and 2K, the game scoring process begins the day after the previous edition is released. Understanding how the songs flow to establish a mood is just as important as selecting individual tracks.
“You're like a DJ in a club. You can have a great set, but if you play one song that feels out of place, you lose the whole audience, and you have to earn that trust back.” Kelly said. “It's something we take very seriously.”
Achieving authentic sound means shaping your soundtrack to fit your sport. Hip-hop, rap, R&B, and pop tracks are often chosen, which doesn't necessarily mean focusing on a specific genre, but rather focusing on what athletes and fans are listening to. Kelly said Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard and Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant have also submitted songs and artists for consideration.
For MLB: The Show, finding the right atmosphere means looking to the players' walk-up songs for inspiration. Ramone Russell, PlayStation Director of Product Development Communications and Brand Strategy; They said they are trying to lean more into the different cultures and ethnicities represented within the sport.
“There's more Latin music, more reggaeton, more bachata. We have to do that to stay true to the source material,” he said. “We base the game of Major League Baseball on real life. If in real life 40% of the players are Latino and the music they listen to on average is Latino, then maybe I Our soundtrack should include Latin music.”
The team putting together the soundtrack for MLB: The Show receives about 50 albums a day from labels and publishers who want to include artists' songs in the game, said a music source from PlayStation Studios. Director Alex Hackford said in an email. Hackford, along with his partners at Sony Music, will send ideas to Russell's team, who will decide what fits into the game's basic soundtrack.
The team has also curated a specific set of music for the game's “Storyline” mode, allowing gamers to act out stories from baseball history. The Negro League-centered “Storyline” mode songs were chosen solely by Russell with the goal of expressing the darker aspects of baseball history through music.
“It's not necessarily a happy story, but what we're trying to focus on here is what these men and women accomplished despite racism and Jim Crow. ” Russell said. “We do not shy away from the ugliness of this story, but we celebrate what these men and women accomplished despite them.”
That's especially true with the appearance on MLB: The Show 24 of Toni Stone, the first woman to play regularly in the men's major leagues.
“When I decided to do Toni Stone, the first thing that came to mind was James Brown's 'It's a Man's Man's Man's World.' There's no doubt about it.'' I thought. The nuances are there. It just puts people in the right mindset for the kinds of stories we're telling. “Because it's still very much a man's world and it was very much a man's world then,'' Russell said. “But as James Brown said, nothing would happen without women. There's a duality there that really helps tie everything together.”
Through new video games released each year, these soundtracks weave their way across sports and eras, becoming cultural touchstones. The songs connect the gameplay experience to moments that go beyond scoring a virtual touchdown or exploding an animated home run.
“No one remembers the unique gameplay from 2009, but everyone remembers the music,” Schnurr said.
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / Athletic. Photo: Kevin Mazur, Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
