

Show HN: Royalty-Free Video Game Music Library - LuckyLionSt
http://luckylionstudios.com/royalty-free-video-game-music-library/

======
rjsamson
Another title change?? This one, again, seems totally inappropriate -
shouldn't "Show HN" posts be exempt from mods changing the title since one
would imagine that the creator of what is being shown has a better idea of an
appropriate title than a mod? Seems to me like its one step away from editing
the very content being linked!

------
josho
Please charge more. My current (indy) project just selected the stock music
for our project. I'm happy to pay $30 / piece. The site that we licensed our
music from had pricing options as well. E.g. $30 for the full track, down to
as low as $7 for a short loop or a stinger.

Also if you can make it easier to find what I'm looking for then I'll look
first at your site rather than others. E.g. is the piece fast/slow tempo,
instruments used, genre or style, etc.

Good luck.

------
aw3c2
Consider making some tracks free to use and share (with your name and contact
info and "I make music for money for you" being mandatory to be kept). You can
use a creative commons license for that. I haven't listened yet but doing this
might mean ending up in free/open-source games and thus maybe being bundled
into linux distributions. Great free advertising.

------
ef4
I'm curious about your choice of pricing.

My uninformed guess is that you can charge substantially more than this and
still provide great value. Consider that $5 is about the cost of four minutes
of programmer time.

~~~
timaelliott
Yeah, he could most likely get away with charging higher. How do you suggest a
company test out pricing though? I mean I think that's exactly what Amazon has
done and they get criticized for doing so (since they do it in a A/B fashion)

I guess he could just bump all the songs to $10 and see if sales
increase/decrease/etc over a period of time. Pricing is definitely an
interesting problem, for all startups.

~~~
metafunctor
Personally, I wouldn't shy away from A/B testing prices (I do it), if you have
enough transactions going on to run a successful experiment.

Running pricing cohorts takes more time, and doing other experiments at the
same time will taint the pricing experiment.

------
esonderegger
Nicely done!

A lot of the commenters here think you're charging too little and I agree.

Have you thought about having two pricing tiers: one for non-exclusive use and
much higher one (maybe $100 per track?) for exclusive use?

If I were a game developer and I thought I was making the next Angry Birds,
having a recognizable theme that I knew no one else would have would be an
easy to understand added value.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Have you thought about having two pricing tiers: one for non-exclusive use
> and much higher one (maybe $100 per track?) for exclusive use?

I think you've vastly underestimated a reasonable price for exclusive use,
given the inability to sell it to anyone else, the amount of time needed to
produce an original piece of music, and any sensible salary for individual
composers.

~~~
esonderegger
Since my day job involves working with composers as they record original
works, I _know_ $100 per track is very low considering the
time/creativity/experience required.

However, I respect that different people are at different stages in their
careers. This may be a rung on the ladder on the way to commissions or a side
project while in school.

I was simply taking the current price of $5 per track and thinking that it may
be unlikely for any given track to be licensed by twenty different game
developers for non-exclusive use. It might yield more revenue to have one
buyer at $100 per track.

------
iharris
The website could use some optimization but it's a great start. I like the
music that you've posted so far. One question, though: Would you consider
doing short musical sound effects ("jingles" for lack of a better word)? For
example, for level-ups or small achievements within a game. A lot of music is
available for games but it seems tough to find decent-sounding musical effects
that can be used in this way.

~~~
LuckyLionSt
That's actually on my to-do list. I want to create a series of shorter
"jingles" that can be packaged and sold as bundles in various styles (so you'd
have a more orchestral set, an electronic set, etc). It's definitely something
I want to have available sooner than later.

------
matthewdanger
Very cool resource and there are some great tracks here. I'm excited to see
how you expand the library to accompany all kinds of different projects, even
beyond games.

I'm quite a fan of royalty-free music, actually I just finished up a project
using 100% royalty-free music from Kevin MacLeod (<http://incompetech.com/>).
He uses a creative-commons license for all of his work, but makes the bulk of
his money through private projects brought on from exposure.

Our project was for an immersive reading experience for The War of the Worlds,
which meant we needed lots and lots of different types of music for all the
story arcs. Shameless plug if you want to check it out:
<http://e-mersiv.com/apps>

Again, I think you could definitely have a market for more than just game devs
out there, your pricing model is attractive enough to be used for short
videos, ebooks, etc.

------
yannickmahe
The idea is extremely appealing. Do you have any idea of the market size?

~~~
LuckyLionSt
I don't have hard numbers but given the popularity of web and mobile game
engines, like Unity3D, there are numerous people entering the game development
space. Music seems to be one of the most often requested areas and most indie
devs either try to make it themselves or buy really crappy music. I figure I
can offer them affordable yet high-quality music. I've been talking to a
handful of social/mobile studios as well and have some ideas on how I'm going
to change the business model to support them.

------
cobrausn
I'm currently working on an indie game that we hope to release within 6 months
or so. Sound effects we were pretty sure we could handle, but music is another
thing altogether. From what I can see here, this fits the bill very well - the
music is appealing and generic enough to be put in numerous types of games,
yet not so generic as to be devoid of the ability to set a mood. I like it a
lot.

Also, I do agree with some of the other posters - you should charge a bit
more. Seems like a steal at $5.00.

Have you considered allowing 'library license' purchases, where you pay a bit
more than list but get access to the entire library and future releases as
well?

As an aside, I am getting a lot of 'File Not Found'.

~~~
timaelliott
Haha, was just going to say the same. Got some "error establishing database
connection". Looks like we broke his server.

------
dkersten
I couldn't browse at all - kept getting knocked back the loading bar. I'm
using Firefox on linux. As others have said already, I'd suggest making a
javascript-free version for people like me who aren't able to listen for
whatever reason (and I see quicktime mentioned on the page - please please no
quicktime, I refuse to install it).

For my purposes, a plain HTML page with download links to a low quality sample
for me to listen to would be enough. (and obviously a shopping cart or some
other way to buy the full quality versions)

Having said that, I love the idea and hope I can listen to some of your music
soon.

------
hmgauna
As a musician and former gamer, I think this is a great idea and interesting
discussion about pricing and business models. Have you thought about a
commission/share model? I don't know the real market, but I think most
musicians won't think about the games industry as a business, so you have
probably less competition there. On the other hand, lately I've seen more and
more indie games, so demand seems to be growing.

With such a low price, I'll have my concerns with the lack of exclusivity.
Maybe you could add a premium price to remove the audio from further selling?

Regards!

~~~
LuckyLionSt
I have a custom audio service on the site as well which I recommend for people
seeking exclusivity and the more traditional commission approach. The prices
are still lower than most composers can offer, but they're obviously a good
deal higher than what I can offer for the non exclusive library tracks.

I've also considered the buyout approach for the library, and it's something I
may eventually include.

------
peterjmag
Great idea! One recommendation: Currently, your site loads a complete instance
of the audio player for each track, which causes Flash's memory usage to shoot
up by a couple hundred MB (Chrome on Windows). Might I suggest something like
Yahoo's WebPlayer instead? It handles long lists of audio files more
gracefully, with a single Flash object. That alone should greatly impact your
page load times and responsiveness.

<http://webplayer.yahoo.com/>

------
kephra
What formats do you offer?

Especially, do you offer a MOD formats (1) or only streamed audio? Because
better games prefer to sync with the engine, and separate spacial tracks with
OpenAL.

(1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_%28file_format%29>

And as told: us$5 is much to low to be taken serious!

------
felipellrocha
Bookmarked it. I understand that you're a musician, and that's why you decided
to start with music, but do you guys have any future plans of also providing
other resources, such as sprite sheets, and that sort of stuff? This site has
a great potential of being a one place stop for indie developers to help them
get started.

~~~
LuckyLionSt
I think that's a great idea and a service that needs to exist, but for me
personally I think that would be biting off a lot more than I could chew.

------
jakesgordon
I have purchased a few tracks from Lucky Lion studios in the past for some
personal projects (<http://codeincomplete.com/>) and been very happy.

I highly recommend them.

Good luck(y lion)!

~~~
LuckyLionSt
Hey! Thanks for the support, I've actually played Snakes!

~~~
jakesgordon
Cool. I also just used a couple of your tracks for a little outrun-style
racing game

<http://codeincomplete.com/posts/2012/6/22/javascript_racer/>

I would agree with the comments that you could charge more (certainly for the
longer tracks)

------
raphaelcaixeta
$5 is a steal. I'm sure you could charge a lot more and still keep customers
happy!

------
iambrakes
I wish you the best of luck but how do you plan on contending with some of the
large stock music sites? I won't give names.

Are you going to open up to other composers to sell through your service?

------
mkilling
Wow those tracks really are cheap. $100 per track would still be cheap.

------
kingatomic
This is a great idea! One of the bigger stumbling blocks for me, as a hopeful
one-man-studio, is that I am crap at making music. This could be the answer to
that. Best of luck to you!

------
gavanwoolery
I am a hobbyist game developer, and this seems like a good resource (I have
bookmarked it). Do you compose all the music or take in tracks from others as
well?

~~~
LuckyLionSt
I compose all of the music at the moment, but as the business grows I would
like to potentially bring in other composers and sound effect artists to offer
a wider selection of styles.

~~~
RyanIyengar
Sent you a message regarding this. Cool idea man, I like the tracks.

------
crgt
Having trouble previewing songs on my iPhone, but this looks like a great
resource. Will check out again when in front of a "real" computer. ; )

------
whiskers
These are great! Have you any plans to provide a package including everything
for a single price? I'd definitely be interested...

------
stewie2
Thank you, this is extremely useful.

I'm a programmer, I can handle some light graphics work. But I can't do music.

------
josscrowcroft
Ough this sounds fantastic but you should have installed WP Super Cache!!

Bookmarked to check back later.

~~~
josscrowcroft
PS I'm also a composer, when can I upload tracks for others to buy? :o)

------
rex64
Cool! Would love more chiptune songs!

~~~
LuckyLionSt
Thanks, that's definitely one of the more popular genres so I'm planning on
bulking up in that area for sure.

------
ga0bi
as a developer+designer team, this resource is going to be tremendous for us!
thank you :)

------
tubbo
what an awesome idea!

------
dltylol
I hope you're a good composer becase you're definitely not good at making
websites :(

Good luck!

~~~
LuckyLionSt
Yeah, the website could definitely use some improvement. Revenue is trickling
in currently, hoping I can contract someone to spruce it up. I've been told
HTML5 audio players would make a big difference in loading speed.

~~~
aw3c2
I highly recommend making a version that does not rely on Javascript for
simply listing the tracks.

