Industry

EA music chief Steve Schnur told Goal that the FC 27 playlist spans 120 songs from 36 countries, and that kickoff meetings for FC 28 have already started. “FC is a platform of music discovery. Period. End of story. It’s not just a game,” he said. For artists, a playlist slot now competes with radio and editorial playlists as a break.

The Zelda anniversary tour is moving from announcement to a major live-event rollout, and the early European queues suggest substantial demand. Today’s North American sales will be the first major indication of how strongly that demand carries into the U.S. market.

Atlus closed the Tokyo date of PERSONA LIVE TOUR 2026 -Resonance- on 23 September 2026 by announcing PERSONA SUPER LIVE 2027, running 19 to 21 March 2027 at Yokohama BUNTAI, with a trailer posted to the ATLUS GAME MUSIC channel. It is the first Super Live since 2022, a five-year gap for what has been Persona’s flagship concert format. Performers and ticket details are still to be announced. Three nights in a purpose-built arena is a meaningful signal: Atlus is scaling its game music as a live business, at the same time it is releasing Persona 4 Revival’s score as a premium physical product.

Sound designers, recordists, mixers and SFX library companies launched the Professional Sound Alliance to push fair licensing of professional sound across film, television, games and AI training. The group frames unauthorized library scraping into commercial AI models (“Data Piracy”) and unlicensed production use (“Sync Piracy”), and is collecting supporters at professionalsoundalliance.org.

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second federal complaint against Suno in Boston, alleging unauthorized copying of 60,202 sound recordings to build its generative models. The labels argue that Suno’s v6 models, described by Suno as trained from scratch with Warner, BMG and Believe partners, are still “the fruit of the same poisoned tree,” because they were built using outputs and preference data from earlier models allegedly trained on unlicensed recordings. The Suno fight extends well beyond streaming. Generative music is increasingly relevant to games, where AI could enable infinite soundtracks. That makes the provenance of the models powering those experiences a gaming issue too. If courts determine that models trained on copyrighted recordings require licenses or that outputs derived from those models carry infringement risk: game developers and platforms integrating generative music could face an entirely new layer of rights complexity. The opportunity is enormous: but before that becomes infrastructure, the industry needs clarity on what these models can legally learn from and what developers can safely build with them.

Universal Music Group’s lawsuit against DistroKid is ostensibly a music-industry story. For gaming, however, there is another layer worth watching. DistroKid is a direct distribution route into Roblox. Artists can opt to deliver eligible tracks through DistroKid for consideration in the Roblox Creator Store, where developers can discover music for use inside Roblox experiences. That makes the allegations in UMG’s lawsuit relevant well beyond traditional streaming platforms. UMG alleges that DistroKid has distributed large volumes of unauthorized, altered and AI-generated recordings. DistroKid denies those claims and says it will defend itself. But if the integrity of music entering a distribution pipeline is being challenged, an important question follows: what does that mean for downstream platforms receiving music through that pipe, particularly gaming platforms where music can become embedded inside interactive experiences? There is another unusual wrinkle. DistroKid currently tells artists that music delivered to Roblox through its service is not monetized. Artists are therefore making their music available for use in one of the world’s largest gaming ecosystems without direct monetization through that distribution route. None of this establishes wrongdoing by Roblox, nor does UMG’s complaint itself determine liability downstream. But it exposes a growing tension as music moves deeper into games: distribution can scale much faster than rights infrastructure, attribution and monetization. For music and gaming to become a sustainable market rather than simply another promotional channel, those systems eventually have to catch up.