April 30, 2008

GameZone interviews SingStar’s Alex Hackford
By: Steven Hopper

“Really my goal with SingStar is to use it both to give you Billy Joel and Outkast, and also give you an opportunity to find something else that could be the next band coming through town.”

Sony’s SingStar series has been selling like crazy all over the world for a couple of years now, with over a million units sold in North America in the short time that it’s been available. Now, the series is gearing up to make its North American PS3 debut, pulling out all of the stops with a robust downloads service, community features, and great new gameplay elements. Already a huge success in Europe, SingStar for PS3 is shaping up to be quite an impressive and complete music title.

At the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California, GameZone had the chance to sit down with SCEA’s Alex Hackford (A&R person on the upcoming game) to ask him a few questions on his criteria for artist selection, the competition, and why you probably won’t see “Purple Rain” in a music game any time soon.

When searching out new talent to appear in a game like SingStar, what are your criteria for emerging artists?

Alex: Well, it’s interesting for a bunch of different games like Gran Turismo, MLB, NBA or games like that where music is sort of tangential to the gameplay. You basically have to keep your finger on the pulse and what’s going on in the clubs, what’s going on in the music scene, doing DMAs seeing where independent bands are selling, and why they’re selling. And then a lot of it is just aesthetic.

What’s great about SCEA as opposed to a lot of other developers (I’m speaking of them as a developer and not a hardware developer at this point) is that it’s a producer driven company, as opposed to a marketing driven company, so I really treat my job like the music supervisor on a film, where if I find a cool band that I think is interesting or someone that can contribute aesthetically to a soundtrack, I’ll go to a producer and sit with them and pitch my vision and play them the song.

If it’s a situation that I think is a great band that has the potential to record something amazing as an original song for a game, I’ll sit down with the band and sit down with the producer to pool ideas and hope for the best. A lot of this is sort of like alchemy to a certain degree, if you’re hiring a band to write a song or a DJ to do a remix or somebody to score for a segment of a game, you’re hiring them because you like their sound and a lot of it’s just feedback and working with the different artists, getting in the studio and just building stuff out, and making stuff work.

How important then is user recognition when selecting a band?

Alex: It’s huge. For SingStar there are two really principle points when I’m looking for a song on a songlist, pegging things together. How recognizable the song is is important, even if someone doesn’t know the lyrics to the song, they’re going to feel excited and compelled to sing it.

The other part of it is whether or not it’s fun to sing. There are a lot of songs that you might know the lyrics to, but aren’t necessarily the most interesting performance pieces. If I’m looking at Twisted Sister as a song to sing, that’s going to be fun, because you can get up there and really lose your mind and have a great time.

For a songlist like SingStar, you want to make sure there’s an equal balance between those two things. Because music users on a video game like this are recidivist users who are going to play the game over and over again, I tend to lean more towards the end of “Is this fun to sing?” as opposed to recognizable because if you own the disc you’re going to be playing through it and there’s only so many times you can sing the songs that you know before you branch out into different things, and obviously I want to make sure that the full experience across the disc and in the SingStore is robust as possible.

That’s why getting into emerging artists that are recording their own videos and presenting their own videos or something like that is both interesting and a challenge. It’s the onus for creating a community around those songs and the drive and demand of those songs is both a gamble on our part and a responsibility to the band, to make sure that people know their music is up there and they want to have a good time with it.

Do you look for songs that will be easy to sing as well as songs that are technically difficult to sing?

Alex: Absolutely. Personally, (and just personally, since a lot of this is what people are going to actually like) I have an affinity for more difficult songs, and it’s hard to not have some of your personal tastes not bleed into it. But the idea is that you have an opportunity to sing them.

I have an affinity for a certain former lead singer of Black Sabbath who’s no longer the lead singer of Black Sabbath, who has a sort of interesting voice and not an easy one to sing, but at the same time I think that for the more challenging users or for people who just want to have a really fun time with it, you put in a song like that by that guy on there.

Not just in terms of vocal tambour but in terms of lyrical complexity, you need to have stuff on there that maybe will force somebody to show their chops and really practice, since the game scores you on both pitch and tempo. So whether you’re able to hit words correctly and get through it as linearly as possible that makes a difference in terms of how you’re scored.

Rock Band is another game out there with their own online store as well as a singing game. Do you perceive them to be competition for what SingStar is trying to accomplish?

Alex: You know, I think it’s different, and this is where I might differ from some of the other producers and colleagues on the game with this, but I view SingStar as a community and a tool base, whereas I view Rock Band as more of a gameplay-driven game.

The number of songs released on Rock Band for PS3 was starkly less than what we’re going to be launching with, specifically because the gameplay is incentive-based gameplay, where you get through a certain area of the game and you are rewarded with a new song. SingStar is more of a toolset for you to just be able to pick up, play and get through it, there’s no incentive base to get to a new song.

SingStar is basically about having a good time and a social experience, where in Rock Band, to a large degree (and I know that there are Rock Band competitions where people go online and play together), but it’s a game that you can really pick up and sit with your guitar and just play through so many aspects of the game. SingStar is more, and we’re going to give you as much upfront as possible.

To that degree, I think that the fact that we are both music-based games that are social gaming experiences, that we are a competitive product, but I think that we each offer different types of experiences. Same with Guitar Hero, for that matter.

Being someone who scouts out a fair amount of new musical artists, who are some of your favorites that you’ve found over the years?

Alex: I manage a bunch of bands myself, I did A&R for Colombia Records for a bunch of years. I signed a guy named John Legend, who’s an R&B singer, so he was one of my favorites about five or six years ago and obviously he’s still a good friend and a tremendous artist. More recently, there are a bunch of new, sort of electronic things that I’ve gotten into. Kavinsky, who’s performing at Coachella, he’s also coming through the Gran Turismo tent, and he’s going to be competing against other players and driving a car.

Diplo is also great, and Switch. Those two guys actually got on stage yesterday at the SingStar tent and sang Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” to two younger girls, which was actually sort of funny. There’s a metal band called Wolf, who is phenomenal. I’m finding more non-traditional genres are producing more interesting stuff for me.

One of the only great major label rock bands to come out recently is a band called Black Tide. It’s funny, I showcased them at Colombia Records about seven years ago and they were like eleven, and they just shredded. They didn’t have any of their own original music yet, but they played “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Crazy Train”, and stuff like that. So you had all this sort of Ronnie James Dio/Geddy Lee style voice, and it was this massive voice. I’ve watched them grow into a real, credible metal band, and I think they’re great.

How important is customer feedback when choosing songs for a game like SingStar?

Alex: I think it’s tremendously important. Europe launched their first SKU for SingStar two or three years before we got our domestic version, so they’ve had a lot more time to build out customer feedback and customer use.

Personally, a lot of the customer feedback that I use comes from taking copies of the game around and giving them to a bunch of different tastemakers, from DJs to actors to musicians to filmmakers, and just made sure that they had them in social environments, and then gone back individually and just said “Hey dude, if you had your druthers, what would you want to sing?”

Some are way outside, like they want to sing Isis or something, which is great but that doesn’t really lend itself well to the game. Not to say that we’re chained to the middle, and I think that the store is going much more of an opportunity to build out that different sort of assortment of music that everyone can find what they want.

Sometimes it comes down to rights and clearances, and there are some artists who aren’t interested in having their songs in a competitive music game, and it’s irrespective of money or exposure. The gentleman who’s headlining tonight, for example (Prince) has absolutely no interest in being in any sort of music game. He’s not in Rock Band, he’s not in Guitar Hero, he’s not in SingStar; he has absolutely no interest in being in these types of games. It’s not because of money, because obviously the guy doesn’t need any money, and frankly it’s a real artistic question, I mean, I’m an artist myself, I’m a musician myself and I deal with musicians all day and it’s just a question of how they want their music experienced.

For me, what’s cool about this game (and music based games in general) is that up until the past couple of years, there have only been very few prescribed ways that you’re meant to enjoy music and most of them are passive, except for the sort of “religious” experience of seeing a band live (religious in the sense of that sort of next level connection with whatever you’re seeing) and what’s cool about SingStar is that it gives the average person that moment, where you are “singing in the shower”. Except you’re not singing in the shower, you’re singing with a couple of friends, in front of your parents or your boyfriend or girlfriend, or a whole group of people at a bar.

Some musicians are sort of scared of that experience, and don’t want their music done that way. So, that’s been a huge part of it. There have been scenarios when I’ve been dealing with some of the biggest bands in the world and I’ve had to go in, in front of them, and sing their songs to them. We test uploaded the game just for their approval, and sometimes they’ve approved and sometimes they haven’t. I’d like to say that I’ve gotten more approvals than I’ve gotten denials, and I like to say that some of that has got to come from my dynamic singing voice [laughs].

But, I think that even with Rock Band, where there’s vocals, there’s also a drum kit and a guitar, so you’re part of a larger thing, and maybe I’m wrong, but more people play either one of those two instruments than sing in Rock Band. If you have two people in a room and they're playing Rock Band, one’s going to be on the drum kit and one’s going to be on the guitar. That might be a wild extrapolation, but I think that’s more often the case than not, because it’s a passive experience, it’s easier to focus on linear gameplay than it is to actually sing, whereas our game really commands you to perform. If you’re going to do it, then you really have to commit and follow through.

What are your hopes for the SingStar franchise?

Alex: As someone who works with music day in and day out, for my own edification and for this job, both for SingStar and other titles, the fact that I can’t trust a radio station anymore, and the fact that I can’t even trust MTV to play a music video is troubling. I think that the music video to a large degree has been an exploited and lost art form, both theatrically, artistically, message-wise, and there was a period of time where you could really find some interesting filmmakers through making of music videos.

I think there is a lack of a filter in our society, to a degree, or sort of mainstream filters. iTunes has their single of the week, which is really cool, and they have so many eyeballs that you get that one single getting that kind of exposure. And sometimes I’m totally into it, and most the time it’s stuff I’ve heard of and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes I like it and other times I don’t. They tend to more often than not wheel to singer/songwriter type things than bigger bands.

Myspace also has their artist of the week, and my goal is that SingStar becomes a filter like that to a certain degree. Obviously, filters can’t be across the board, and you have to have a relatively narrow focus. With this, it’s your filter of what would be fun to sing, what I enjoy performing. There are many cool artists who might not fit into that filter. You might go to Beatport or any number of different aggregator sites that will give you music that either wouldn’t know about or might not find otherwise, but I think that this is an opportunity for us to act as an artistic filter for different types of music.

Also, we find bands that might be great for a performance element like this and give them that platform to work with, and use it to help other bands get exposure, different price points for emerging bands, a chance to create their own master track and their own video on the platform. I don’t think of it as we’re trying to own their content, but we just want to build a deal in with them that’s sort of revolutionary and new, giving them some promotion and helping them build their fan base and their tour base and stuff like that.

Really my goal with SingStar is to use it both to give you Billy Joel and Outkast, and also give you an opportunity to find something else that could be the next band coming through town. To make sure that there are within the community “Artist Updates” for artists that are featured in the store, what are their tour dates, to make sure those things are live and updated, so that if you like a song, you can say, “Oh, this guy’s going to be here” and then go check them out.

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