Gaming music personalization platform Reactional Music has added another music rights holder to its growing roster of partners.
The Sweden-headquartered company announced on Wednesday (October 23) that it has partnered with Naxos, which describes itself as having the world’s largest catalog of classical music.
The deal means Naxos’ catalog will be available to game developers who use the Reactional Platform to enable customizable music in their games.
Founded by Klaus Heymann in 1987, Hong Kong-born Naxos today owns a variety of imprints and labels covering classical, world, folk, jazz, and cultural music around the world.
The Reactional Platform allows gamers to personalize the music in their video games. The tracks delivered by Reactional become the soundtrack of the game, with tracks matching gameplay. Reactional stresses that this customization doesn’t affect the master recordings.
Naxos and Reactional also confirmed that they are exploring a collaboration to create interactive soundtracks that would generate music in real time around the gamer and gameplay.
“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.”
Håkan Lagerqvist, Naxos
“Our partnership with Reactional Music is incredibly exciting. Reach and access into interactive and game developers and their customers and gamers is an important step for Naxos,” said Håkan Lagerqvist, CEO of Naxos Digital Services.
“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. For gamers, Naxos brings a pallet of ideas and choice that can work in so many different worlds and interactive experiences,” Lagerqvist continued.
“Naxos will also explore how our composers’ work and our music catalogs can be enabled as full interactive game soundtracks. These are generated in real time note by note around the gameplay. This is potentially incredibly 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 has long advocated for gaming as a large new source of revenue for music. Citing data from research firm MIDiA, it noted that the global video game market was worth $223.1 billion in 2023. In-game purchases came to $125.7 billion, with $72.5 billion of that spent on cosmetic content and in-game personalization. However, music accounted for just 0.01% of that spend.
Reactional aims to increase music’s share of gamers’ spending through in-game purchases. In April 2023, the company closed a $2 million pre-Series A funding round, led by mobile music games publisher Amanotes and early stage VC Butterly Ventures.
Since then, the company has formed licensing partnerships with numerous music rights holders, including Sony– and Universal-owned production music company APM, indie label owner Beggars Group, house music company Defected Records, and labels Cherry Red Records and Hopeless Records.
In all, the company says it has now partnered with more than 50 music rights holders, including Hipgnosis Song Management, Soundstripe, and Alibi.
“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.”
David Knox, Reactional Music
“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,” said Reactional Music President David Knox.
“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. 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.”Music Business Worldwide