Older teenagers are FIFA’s core audience, so it’s vital their soundtrack chimes with what they’re listening to. “If you think about that age, how critically important music was to you before you had to start paying for rent and water and electricity? It was everything and anything in your life.” But how easy has it been to keep up with the frontline of new music for over a decade? I put it to Schnur that the soundtracks have lost their edge in recent years. As indie’s popularity started to wane, Maximo Park and Art Brut were joined by Santigold and Robyn in FIFA 08, by FIFA 09 there was a nu-rave flavour in Cut Copy, CSS and Foals. “They’re actually having their sport sound like FIFA the game, rather than sound like other leagues in the US, who rely on the AC/DCs and The Queens.”ĭiscovery has always been at the heart of FIFA’s soundtracks, so naturally they have had to adapt as musical tastes have changed. “The MLS and their teams have us continually advising them on what the ‘sound’ of the sport should sound like,” Schnur explains. His team have started to define what makes good ‘football music’ to a whole new audience in North America. According to Schnur, FIFA Spotify playlists are some of the most popular brand-related playlists on the platform. It’s one thing when you break an artist, it’s another thing when some of the biggest artists in the world tell you how many others they’ve discovered through the game.”įIFA soundtracks have carved out their own place in the musical landscape, even as YouTube and streaming services make music discovery easier than ever.
“We had similar conversations with Snoop Dogg. Schnur says he recently spent a weekend with Ed Sheeran, who gushed over a long list of artists and songs he’d discovered growing up playing the game. When I hear the opening chords of either track I’m there, 2004, watching a young Total90-donned Ronaldinho effortlessly joga-bonito-ing past an entire team, deliberately whacking the ball against the crossbar three times in a row and then backheeling it between the keeper’s legs. It also featured ‘Red Morning Light’ by the Kings of Leon and ‘LSF’ by Kasabian, two songs that have since transcended the game and become football anthems in their own right. My favourite soundtrack, FIFA 2004’s, had tracks by The Dandy Warhols, Caesars and The Raveonettes - predicting the wave of garage-rock revival that took over in the mid-2000s. It proved to be a treasure trove for unearthing new music - tapping into the existing trends, while simultaneously predicting new ones. “Every artist we spoke to… they all played FIFA, and they all saw what their potential audiences were doing: playing FIFA.” Whilst labels were sometimes dismissive about appearing on FIFA soundtracks back then, Schnur says that the talent always got it. The idea was simple: EA would stock its soundtracks with a range of new talent, as well as a few established acts, and labels would benefit from having their artists’ music delivered straight to a huge captive audience. In 2001 EA introduced its Trax sponsored_longform, signing deals with record labels to include up-and-coming artists on a range of its games - including the FIFA series.
He says his goal was to elevate FIFA’s music from the sort of stuff that would get dads in cars nodding along in approval to the “most culturally relevant playlist on the planet”.
FIFA 2000, released a year before he joined EA, featured songs by Robbie Williams and ska-pop stalwarts Reel Big Fish. Steve Schnur, president of the EA Music Group, leads the team behind the soundtracks. Whether it was Miss Dynamite’s ‘Miss Dy-Na-Mi-Tee’ on FIFA 2003, ‘Fit But You Know It’ by the Streets on FIFA 2005, or Caribou’s ‘Odessa’ on FIFA 11, the soundtracks nailed a particular sound that chimed with the halcyon days of the Premier League Years. It feels like FIFA has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to reflecting what the ‘sound’ of football should be, but to my mind the golden era of its soundtracks ran from around 2003 to 2010. Limewire downloads were slow, trips to see my one loaded mate with the music channels were infrequent, but there was one resource I could rely on for the best new music, year-in-year-out: the FIFA soundtrack. Back in the early 2000s, pre-YouTube and Spotify, discovering new music was a pain in the arse.