Steve Schnur couldn’t sleep. He calls it 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 colleagues who have long since gone to bed.
That’s how he found Lola Young.
Schnur, the president of music at Electronic Arts, was scrolling through Instagram one morning last November when he discovered Young’s husky, soulful voice. “Oh my god… you know what,” He thought and immediately sent a text message to Cybele Pettus, EA’s senior music director.
Two days later, they attended a rooftop party in Los Angeles, where three emerging musicians performed for a crowd of industry veterans. A young British woman walked out with long black hair, messy bangs and a nose ring. The same singer-songwriter Schnur texted Pettus at 3 a.m.
“We really fell in love with her,” Petters said. “She was so charming and so funny and her music was like a storyteller. We went right up to her and told her how much we loved her set – like three songs – and met her manager. She She had just signed to a record label at the time…I didn’t even think her record was done yet.
Schnur and Pettus wanted her to work on EA Sports FC 25, the latest version of the popular soccer game. Aside from watching the World Cup, Young doesn’t play video games or follow sporting events. But she knew it was a What’s the big deal. Her song “Flicker of Light” is included in 117 songs by artists from 27 countries.
“It’s interesting because it’s a male-dominated game, but there are a lot of women playing it. I’m excited to be a part of this game because I’m a female artist doing my thing,” Yang said.
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Not all traces emerge from chance encounters on rooftops. But Schnur’s Young Way is emblematic of the modern effort to create quality, fresh video game soundtracks.
Curating such a wide variety of repertoire requires a keen eye become Next Breakout songs, not just having your finger on the pulse of songs that are already topping the charts or going viral on TikTok. At EA, Schnur challenged his team to a music scavenger hunt with one rule: Don’t listen to the radio or any major media that plays music.
“I don’t want what’s going on today to affect what’s going to happen six months from now,” Schnur said. “You can’t name a game ‘Madden 25’ and make it sound like 2023. From a design perspective, it has to be a place of discovery, a place that solidifies what it will sound like next year. In this case, the sport itself To be part of that sound.
To achieve this goal, Schnur and his fellow song hunters scour the globe in search of new tracks. They attend concerts by emerging artists, hear advice from current athletes, and hear live opinions from the biggest names in the industry.
From Green Day to Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas, everyone wants to know what they have to do to appear in the wildly popular video game. In the case of the former, that meant Schnur playing “American Idiot” on acoustic guitar to lobby for its spot in Madden 2005. It comes as the nine-time Grammy winner hopes to join FC 25.
Early access to albums and concert tickets are perks, but work also brings some pressure. Curating a video game soundtrack means creating a playlist that millions of people will listen to over and over again. Avid gamers remember music, for better or worse. The best songs are remembered even decades later when a song immediately evokes memories of a game, a time and a place.
The team tasked with piecing together the soundtrack knew their work would live on as a virtual time capsule once the current game was replaced by future iterations, but they strove to make the initial experience an introduction to new sounds rather than a nod to old favorites .
“For 20- and 25-year-olds, the voice of the NFL is very different than their parents’ because the tone they associate with football comes from Madden,” Schnur said. “It doesn’t come through broadcasts or live football matches. It comes from the virtual experience. And with that comes a huge responsibility to get it right and know that you’re defining the future voice of the sport.
It’s a David Kelley thing 2K’s Director of Music Partnerships and Licensing takes this into consideration when selecting songs for the NBA2K series.
“The biggest thing for us is we want it to always be future-proof. We want it to sound like something you’ve never heard before,” he said.
An artist at 2K released a 2025 title on September 3rd, and it’s very future-oriented.
In June, 310babii, an 18-year-old rapper from Inglewood, California, received his high school diploma and a platinum medal for his hit single “Soak City (Do It)” on the same day. As an avid 2K player, he jumped at the chance to land a coveted spot on the soundtrack. He wrote and recorded a basketball-inspired song, “Forward, Backward,” specifically for NBA 2K25, and wanted to hear it during game replays of LeBron James dunking on other players.
Just as millennial gamers equate Madden 04 with Blink-182 and Yellowcard, or recall the soundtrack to Tony Hawk Pro Skater, 310babii equates the NBA 2K games of his childhood with it. artists are connected.
“For me, 2K16 is one of my favorites. When I was in fifth grade, I remember DJ Khaled having the craziest songs. That’s what makes this game special to me, besides the game itself. ,” he said. “For a 10-year-old, my song might be appropriate for him.”
At EA and 2K, the game scoring process begins the day after the last version is released. Figuring out how the songs fit together to establish a mood is just as important as choosing the individual tracks.
“You’re kind of like a DJ in a club. You might have a great set, but if you play a song that doesn’t feel right, you’re going to lose the whole audience, and you have to rebuild that trust,” Kelly said. “This is something we take very seriously.”
Creating an authentic sound means shaping a soundtrack that suits the sport. This doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on a specific genre, although hip-hop, rap, R&B, and pop are common choices, but it does mean focusing on what athletes and fans are listening to. Kelly said Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard and Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant would even send songs or artists for consideration.
For MLB: The Show, finding the right vibe means finding inspiration in the songs the players perform. Raymond Russell, PlayStation Director of Product Development Communications and Brand Strategy, Said they try to learn more about the different cultures and races represented in the sport.
“We started playing more Latin music, more reggaeton and some bachata. We had to do that if we were going to stay true to the source material,” he said. “We’re making a Major League Baseball game based on real life. If in real life 40% of the players are Latinx, and the average music they listen to is Latinx, then we should probably have some Latinx in the soundtrack. music.
Alex Hackford, director of music at PlayStation Studios, said in an email that the team behind the “MLB: The Show” soundtrack receives about 50 albums a day from record labels and publishers looking to include artists’ tracks in the game. Working with partners at Sony Music, Hackford sent ideas to Russell’s team, which then decided what would fit into the game’s basic soundtrack.
The team also curated a specific set of music for the game’s “storyline” mode, which allows players to play out stories from baseball history. The songs for the Negro Leagues-centric “storyline” mode were chosen solely by Russell to express 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 don’t shy away from the ugliness in this story, but we celebrate what these men and women accomplished despite what they went through.”
Nowhere is this more evident than with the addition of Toni Stone to MLB: The Show 24, the first woman to be a regular in the men’s major leagues.
“When we decided we were going to do Tony Stone, the first song that came to my mind was James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World.’ I thought, ‘This has to be her intro song because it’s perfect. Subtle. The difference is there. It just puts people in the right frame of mind for the story we’re telling because it’s still very much a man’s world, and it was a man’s world at that time,” Russell said. . “But as James Brown said, without a woman you’re nothing. The duality there really helps tie everything together.
In every new video game released year after year, these soundtracks are intertwined with movement and time, becoming cultural touchstones. These songs combine the gaming experience with moments beyond scoring a virtual touchdown or exploding animated home run.
“No one remembers the unique gameplay that came out in 2009,” Schnur said, “but everyone remembers the music.”
(Illustration: Mickey Robinson/ sports; Photo: Kevin Mazur, Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
