The minds behind the soundtracks of EA Sports FC, NBA 2K and Madden source music from everywhere but the obvious

Steve Schnur can'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, discovers new music and sends it to his colleagues who have long gone to bed.

That's how he found Lola Young.

When Schnur, the president of music at Electronic Arts, was swiping through Instagram one morning last November, he came across Young's raspy, soulful voice. “Holy… you know what,” he thought, and immediately texted Cybele Pettus, EA's senior music supervisor.

Two days later, they attended a rooftop party in Los Angeles, where three up-and-coming musicians performed for a crowd of industry veterans. A young British woman walked out with long dark hair, choppy bangs and nose rings. The same singer-songwriter Schnur had texted Pettus at 3 a.m

“We literally fell in love with her,” Pettus said. “She was so engaging, so interesting, such a storyteller with her music. We went straight to her, told her how much we loved her set – which consisted of three songs – and met her manager. She was very recently signed to a label at the time… I don't even think her record was finished.”

Schnur and Pettus wanted her for EA Sports FC 25, the latest edition of the wildly popular football game. Young doesn't play video games or follow any sports outside of watching the World Cup. But she knew it was one big problem. Her song “Flicker of Light” is nestled among 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. It's exciting for me to be in the game because I'm a female artist doing my thing,” Young said.

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Not all songs come from chance encounters on the roof. But Schnur's path to Young is emblematic of the modern attempt to build a high-quality, fresh video game soundtrack.

To put together such an extensive collection of varied songs, it takes an ear for what wants be the next breakout song instead of just keeping a finger on the pulse of what's already topping the charts or going viral on TikTok. At EA, Schnur challenges his team to a musical treasure hunt with the rule: don't listen to the radio or any other major outlet where music is played.

“I don't want the influence of what is now to influence what will be in the next six months,” Schnur said. “You can't call a game 'Madden 25' and make it sound like 2023. It has to be, by design, a place of discovery, a place that confirms what the coming year will sound like. A place where the sport itself will be part of this sound.”

To achieve this, Schnur and his fellow song seekers scour the world in search of new songs. They attend concerts from emerging artists, take suggestions from current athletes and field submissions from the biggest names in the industry.

Everyone from Green Day to Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas wants to know what they need to do to appear in the wildly popular video games. In the former case, that meant playing “American Idiot” on acoustic guitars so Schnur could lobby for placement on Madden 2005. In the latter case, Schnur got to hear Eilish's new album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” before it was finished , because the nine-time Grammy winner wanted to play in FC 25. Eilish's “CHIHIRO” appears in the game.

Album sneak peeks and concert tickets are perks, but the work also comes with some pressure. Putting together a video game soundtrack means creating a playlist that millions of people will hear – over and over again. Avid gamers will remember the music in a positive or negative way. And the best ones are remembered even decades later, when a song immediately brings back memories of a game and a time and place.

The teams responsible for curating the soundtracks are well aware that their work will live on as virtual time capsules once a current game is replaced by a future iteration, but they aim for the first experience to be an introduction to new sounds instead of a recognition. of old favorites.

“The sound of the NFL for a 20- or 25-year-old is very different from his parents because the tone he associates with football comes from Madden,” Schnur said. “It doesn't come through broadcasts or live football matches. It comes from the virtual experience. That comes with a huge responsibility to get it right and know that you are defining the sound of the future sport.

That's something that David Kelley, the director of music partnerships and licensing at 2K, considers when selecting songs for the NBA2K franchise.

“The most important thing for us is that we always want it to be future-oriented. We want it to sound like something you've never heard before,” he said.

One 2K artist listed for its 2025 installment, released on September 3, was as forward-looking as they come.

In June, 310babii, an 18-year-old rapper from Inglewood, California, collected his high school diploma and a platinum plaque for his hit single “Soak City (Do It)” on the same day. As an avid 2K player, he jumped at the chance to secure a coveted spot on the soundtrack. He wrote and recorded “forward, back,” a basketball-inspired song, exclusively for NBA2K25, and hopes to hear it when the game shows replays of LeBron James dunking on other players.

Just as Millennial gamers equate Madden 04 with Blink-182 and Yellowcard or harken back to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, 310babii associates the NBA2K episodes of his youth with the artists featured.

“For me, 2K16 is one of my favorites. When I was in fifth grade, I remember DJ Khaled had the craziest songs on there. That made the game special for me, apart from the gameplay itself,” he said. “For a 10-year-old kid, my song could be that for him.”

At EA and 2K, the process for scoring a game begins the day after the previous edition launches. Figuring out how the songs flow together to create a mood is just as important as choosing the individual songs.

“You're kind of like a DJ in a club. You can have a great set, but if you play one song that feels out of place, you lose the entire audience and have to build that trust back up,” Kelley said. “It's something we take very seriously.”

To create an authentic sound, you need to tailor the soundtrack to the sport. That doesn't necessarily mean focusing on a particular genre, although hip-hop, rap, R&B and pop songs are often chosen, but it does mean tapping into what athletes and fans listen to. Kelley said Milwaukee Bucks point guard Damian Lillard and Phoenix Suns forward Kevin Durant even sent songs or artists for consideration.

For MLB: The Show, finding the right vibe may mean looking at players' walk-up numbers for inspiration. Ramone Russell, PlayStation director of product development, communications and brand strategy, said they have tried to be more inclusive of the different cultures and ethnicities represented within the sport.

“We started with more Latin music, more reggaeton, some bachata. We have to do that if we're going to be accurate to the source material,” he said. “We're making a Major League Baseball game based on something from real life. If in real life 40 percent of the players are Latin, and the music they listen to on average is Latin, our soundtrack should probably have some Latin music in it.”

The team putting together the MLB: The Show soundtrack receives about 50 albums a day from labels and publishers hoping to put an artist track in the game, PlayStation Studios director of music business Alex Hackford said in an email. Working with partners at Sony Music, Hackford sends ideas to Russell's team, who then decides what goes on the game's base soundtrack.

The team is also putting together a specific music set for the game's 'Storylines' mode, which allows gamers to recreate stories from baseball history. The songs for the “Storylines” mode that focused on the Negro Leagues were chosen solely by Russell, with the intention of expressing the more somber aspects of baseball history through music.

“That's not necessarily a happy story to tell, but what we're trying to focus on here is what these men and women accomplished despite racism and Jim Crow.” Russel said. “We don't shy away from the ugliness in this story, but we celebrate what these men and women have accomplished despite these things. ”

This is especially evident with the introduction of Toni Stone, the first woman to play regularly in a men's Major League, in MLB: The Show 24.

“When we decided we were going to play Toni Stone, the first song that came to mind was 'It's A Man's Man's Man's World' by James Brown. I'm like, 'This has to be her intro song because it's perfect. The nuance is there. It will just get people in the right mindset for the type of story we're telling.” Because it's still a real man's world, and it was a real man's world back then,” Russell said. “But as James Brown said, it would be nothing without a woman. There's that duality there that really helps tie everything together.

With each new video game released year after year, these soundtracks weave through sports and across time to become cultural touchstones. The songs connect the gameplay experience to moments beyond scoring virtual touchdowns or shooting animated home runs.

“No one remembers that unique piece of gameplay that came about in 2009,” Schnur said, “but everyone remembers the music.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The athletic; Photos: Kevin Mazur, Sean Gallup / Getty Images)