Sell / Market Music through Steam

[grandexalted]

As a musician with music up on everyone online store available, it'd be nice to find a non-annoying way to help market and sell music without being a spammer or being annoying. Maybe something as simple as my steam friends being able to see what i'm listening to and maybe switch to it. Is Steam Music planning to be more of a streaming service or a Music Store. As you may may have read streaming services pay musicians dirt and are really kill purchases of music. Maybe a way that someone could include your music in a mod they've created and include one of your songs would create some sort of micro transaction. I'm really just spit balling but I can't be the only steam user out there who has music available that could add value to the whole steam experience in some way just like modders or artists do.

[Scrabbler]

Same here, great idea <thumbsup>

[AwesomeOcelot]

Great idea about licensed game music, a bit like YouTube. Also could have suggested soundtracks by developers, so you have a playlist where you own or buy some tracks to play a game with. Finally have something built into Steamworks where you can add playlists into games so the music plays in vehicle or from speakers in the map.

[state_of_xance]

Eh, not a bad idea by any means. As long as there's no "User driven community! Upload your own songs to distrubute!" then I'd be down with that. Nobody wants Steam to become another Indaba or Beatport Play, eh?

[OCD]

I'm not even a musician and I support this.

[grandexalted]

Pretty much exactly like youtube but with hopefully a better way for people to find music they want to download. Right now the best way for a musician to market the music they have is playing shows and having physical pieces of paper with web url's on it, or posting on facebook or reverbnation. It would be great if there were a way to search for music less by genre and more by mood maybe. Search for high energy intense music or spooky or happy or whatever a modder might want to set the tone for what they're working on. Maybe even a market for indie devs who might not have a full time composer.

[arahman56]

Some games already sell their soundtrack on Steam. The problem is, they are sold as DLC, and thus the music gets thrown into the game's directory. Not ideal. Steam should start by introducing a "Music" category for them, and support for them to be downloading to a separate directory, as selected by the user.

[[OH] Cogglesz]

This would be pretty awesome, my work involves music/sound production and engineering and I've always wanted to help out with games or mods with people in my spare time for free, putting two of my favorite hobby's together into one would be a blessing, and i feel like i can really contribute to the community if valve gave us musicians the tools to get in with the developers, valves provided us with plenty before so i can imagine this being a possibility, i agree with arahman56 that there should be some kind of music category, with forums to meet new people looking to work together and make some fantastic projects. Great post OP, it would be kick ass to see some soundtracks in their own music section, even then i think if this happens we should be able to do our stuff for free and not strictly keep it a market where every song is something you need to purchase, it should have a connection of sorts between the musician and the person wanting to buy, it'l be hard to implement but amazing.

[Takito Lethal]

i am happy to know i am not alone on the concept of musical distribution through steam. hopefully there's enough spark of interest to make something happen with it, that would be awesome!

[rughe.cotone]

I would like to see soundtracks for games available on Steam, as it would encourage developers to give more attention to their soundtracks and make them more readily available (something I find myself wanting in many games). As far as user-generated content goes, I vote no; that would become far too messy far too fast. Steam Music support for playback from Soundcloud seems like a more reasonable alternative to that.

[Takito Lethal]

Originally posted by maestro35:

As far as user-generated content goes, I vote no; that would become far too messy far too fast. Steam Music support for playback from Soundcloud seems like a more reasonable alternative to that.

as the guy above me has previously stated, having user-generated content would most likely end up in a mess... but thats not to say something like maybe a portal feature where only the better submissions make it through, i mean no offense to any of the game developers out there but since greenlight came into effect i've been seeing tidal waves of garbage concept games and some even make it through. now you cant say its fair to just assume every musician on steam sucks, because guaranteed even though maybe some of those game developers arent the masters of their art theres always somebody voting towards a finished product to play and enjoy, why should music be any different? i mean, if its got its own section then the 'mess' of submissions can easily be avoided on your part so why even be bothered by this? perhaps your right and the whole support playback from soundcloud would be effective, i personally don't use soundcloud so i wouldnt even know. i dont use any of those websites built for distribution, mostly out of trust issues for both my entitlements and profits being easily manipulated so the artist makes nearly nothing out of their efforts. at least with steam, i trust this program and company 110% and i know if they actually went through with a feature for musicians to sell music, i could see this being beneficial towards both musicians and game developers; with essentially a lot of potential to push projects into directions they never would have went into without this feature.

[grandexalted]

I would imagine that if they went for their own music store they would likely contract with some of the other distribution out there. I put my music up on cdbaby.com (they're awesome btw) and I've been able to find my music on pretty much any online distributer I've ever tried. Problem is, while cdbaby pays you something like 97% of the sale, their partners only pay you around 60%. But heck i'd still take that over the streaming folks. Spotify pays $0.0025 a stream, last.fm $0.0005 google cloud $0.012 Rhapsody $0.0091 Rdio $0.0018 . You get the point. I'd hoped when signing up for those streaming services they might get the music out there into playlists where my music might be similar to someone else they like and might lead to some online mp3 purchases but that doesn't seem to be happening at all. Thats what brings me to the idea of meta tagging music by its mood and feeling, energy etc. Music to frag by etc. I don't know, would you play to something like this? http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/therefuzniks

[Infinity Gems]

I would promote this as long as they are actual bands, musicians and artist with proof of concept.

I REALLY don't want every kid and their brother putting up ♥♥♥♥♥ music on the marketplace and horrible dubstep mixes thinking they are the next Skrillex

[SonicXVe]

This could have some massive potential. It could suggest songs based on the games you typically play, assuming you want to play that music over the game. Think Spotify or Last.fm, except instead of tracking genres and artists necessarily, it tracks what genres and artists over what games you play, and perhaps what parts of the games you play, and can provide personalized suggestions that way. Even if Steam doesn't implement this itself, it could provide an interface for this as a Spotify app for example, suggesting tracks based on the game library through Spotify itself.
Games whose soundtracks are purchasable or are available to use could also let you seek through them and choose songs that you might prefer. Even if you don't own the soundtrack, maybe you could have the option of playing certain tracks as you play the game.

[grandexalted]

Originally posted by Infinity Gems:

I would promote this as long as they are actual bands, musicians and artist with proof of concept.

I REALLY don't want every kid and their brother putting up ♥♥♥♥♥ music on the marketplace and horrible dubstep mixes thinking they are the next Skrillex

If Valve were to partner with someone like cdbaby or reverbnation then at the very least musicians would have to pony up around $70 in order to put their music up. This would keep it to the slightly more serious contenders.

[DaVince]

Great idea, doesn't seem like a thing for Steam though. It's a very different kind of service and you'd be slowly drifting to a catch-all solution for distribution of content of any kind, that way, and I'm sure Valve wants to focus on Steam.

Things like Bandcamp are the solution right now. If Bandcamp could somehow get more integrated with everything else, that'd be a plus there.