Roblox will launch music charts. The music industry remains wary

Gaming platform Roblox announced Friday (September 6) that it will launch music charts in early 2025, bringing songs to a new level of potential exposure for its nearly 80 million daily active users.

At the Roblox developer conference, the company also said it was entering into a new partnership with DistroKid, allowing distributors to make their music available in the Roblox ecosystem, which consists of millions of games. This marks the platform's first collaboration with a major rights holder in the music industry. However, independent artists who take advantage of this opportunity will not make money from Roblox when their songs are used, underscoring the thorny relationship between the music and gaming industries.

Artists and record companies are dying for better ways to reach gamers — a large segment of the world's population, many of them young, who are often as excited about music as they are about the games they love. But artists and record companies also want to be paid for their work.

Across the aisle, games would like to capitalize on the credibility of artists and add pizzazz to their soundtracks. But they often have little patience for the music industry's licensing system, which they see as old-fashioned and overly complicated, and its penchant for high fees. And the success of games usually does not depend on the involvement of the music industry.

The gap between these views has limited opportunities for artists in gaming – especially those who aren't already stars – except for a few titles.

But the music industry would still like to bridge the gap, and the virtual universe of Roblox is a particularly tempting target. This is because it has a tempting number of users whose avatars roam around, hang out with friends or flock to games like Adopt me!where virtual pets are raised. Labels would like to reach these crowds.

Roblox Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein says the platform wants to help. For more music discovery, it will add a kind of audio player that can show users what track is playing in the Roblox experience they are enjoying.

As a result, “users will be able to see the name of the song, the artist [behind it]and even like the song,” says Bronstein. This information will then feed into the platform's music charts, which will rank tracks based on engagement. In an ideal world, charts act like a two-way mirror — reflecting listening habits but also facilitating discovery for curious listeners. (Roblox will also create a separate ranking that tracks the popularity of musical experiences on the platform to help players looking for what's known as “rhythm games,” where the activity is typically associated with playing an instrument or dancing. )

The music industry's approach to Roblox has gradually evolved over the past few years. Initially, stars like Lil Nas X made headlines with single concerts. However, these are expensive and time-consuming to put together, and the reward is short-lived. They have largely fallen out of fashion.

Artists and labels have also created their own Roblox experiences. But it's hard to stand out in the land of a million games, and a big name doesn't guarantee a big audience.

On August 29, for example, electronic producer Zedd announced that he was taking over Universal Music Group's Roblox experience Beat Galaxy. Visits rose from about 4,000 on the 28th to about 10,000 a day later, according to the website RoMonitor, which tracks Roblox activity. Not bad, except that this amounts to a drop in the platform audience the size of an ocean. Piggywhere players try to escape a killer pig wielding a baseball bat, attracted more than 2.7 million hits on the same day. And RoMonitor data shows that there are more than 30 Roblox experiences that earn more daily visitors than Piggy.

“There are so many games on the platform,” he says Matt Omblerwho works as a music and gaming consultant while also editing MusicEXP, a newsletter about the intersection of the two worlds. “There is absolutely no guarantee that launching an activation will get artists in front of those 80 million players.”

Some artists have had success “by tapping into already thriving experiences,” according to Jessie Wyldesenior director of artist and business development at Artist Partner Group (APG); “And short-form Roblox UGC edits on social” — clips of Roblox activity posted on TikTok and elsewhere — “continue to be a key driver of consumption across the APG catalog.” (In the future, Wylde would love to see “more native means for players to save songs and/or follow artists on streaming services while staying in Roblox.”)

Ombler takes a look at Charli XCX's recent collaboration with the wildly popular game Dress to impress as a new premium badge for artists on Roblox. In his newsletter he noted that “daily visits for Dress to impress jumped from 22.49 million on August 16 to 34.09 million on August 16 [the collaboration’s Aug. 17] launch, up 41%. Concurrent users also jumped from a peak of 290,000 to a peak of 641,000.

But Charli XCX, a well-known artist with big hits, doesn't need Roblox to break through. Holy Knives are interested in the platform's partnership with DistroKid because it could give smaller acts like them a chance to find new listeners. “The Majors probably don't need more exposure,” says Kody Valentine, a member of the duo along with his brother Kyle. “As independent artists, that's the number one thing we need. If this can be done through Roblox, that's amazing.”

The band chose to make their music available on Roblox so game developers could put it into experiences. (DistroKid artists must opt ​​in to the program.) The hope is that they'll gain enough fans to offset the fact that they won't be directly compensated for any use of their music.

Bronstein points out that if artists like The Holy Knives are discovered on Roblox, “they also have means to monetize off the platform” — if players go stream the band somewhere else, for example. (It's also easy for artists to start selling virtual merchandise on Roblox, which has been lucrative for some stars. Ombler thinks more artists should try that.) But Roblox “starts as a promotional medium in the first place,” he notes. Bronstein.

Artists only have one career, so they often trade royalty income for exposure. DistroKid makes money when artists sign up to distribute their music and doesn't share in the royalties they make, so it doesn't have a dog in the fight. For major labels, on the other hand, giving away music for free is a tough pill to swallow, especially recently.

CEO of UMG Lucian Grainge made it clear during a speech in 2022. First, “[we] they were given a lot of reasons why our artists shouldn't be paid” by MTV and YouTube, Grainge recalls. “People were saying, 'It's a big promotion' or 'you can use it as a platform to discover new artists.' Technology platforms were built on the backs of artists' hard work.”

When asked about the potential for future monetization opportunities, Bronstein says, “We want to get there. Once you have the momentum, you have the opportunity to think of creative ways for artists to monetize.” (Karibi Dagogo-Jack(who previously served as Roblox's head of music partnerships, is no longer with the company.) But the music industry's fear is that the opposite is happening: platforms gain momentum and then use that leverage to argue that they should pay even less for music.

Alex TarrantCOO/co-founder of STYNGR, tried to find a way for rights holders to play their music on Roblox and get paid for it. STYNGR is licensed with all major labels and publishers. Game developers can then use this music without paying up front.

In the Roblox universe, that music comes from a boombox — the old radio in a new virtual world. Users either pay for listening time or developers can put an ad-supported version of the product into their experiences. Revenue from user payments and advertising is then shared between major labels, publishers, game developers and STYNGR. “Session length increases for people who are actively engaged with the music player,” according to Tarrand. “And we're seeing session frequency increase.”

Despite some of the ongoing friction between the music industry and Roblox, the search for common ground continues. This week, Tarrand flew to the Roblox Developer Conference to meet with more developers. “Music is a big topic of conversation at this RDC,” he says. “That's very promising.”