Video Game Soundtrack Albums and the Digital Revolution

Abstract

Original soundtracks (OST) albums retailed poorly in North America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and very few were released, but their success in the Japanese market created a platform for OST albums that allowed the niche genre to survive the digital revolution in a physical format. This chapter presents a partial history of video game soundtrack albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s to explain these two distinct tendencies in video game music. Electronic Arts saw licensed music as essential to their business, and used soundtrack albums to carve out a space for themselves within the music industry and improve their negotiating position with artists and labels. The persistence of video game soundtrack albums, despite their lack of success at retail, is an expression of the music and video game industries’ conviction in their mutually beneficial relationship and their shared understanding of the power of music to define taste.