K/DA virtual band. A case study on the contribution of video games to the future of the music industry

INITIAL STRUCTURE:

Objectives and Methodology

Presentation of the K/DA Group and History

The success in the charts

Virtual Beings and the power of Storytelling

Marketing strategy and music strategy: a success story impacting two industries

Effects on the music industry: are video game companies the new record labels?

The music element

The fandom element

The solution: Video Games

A hybrid future

Interview from the industry

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix

Objectives and Methodology

I would like to analyze the K/DA phenomenon, the virtual band whose members are characters of the video game League of Legends. First, it is interesting to see what made the existence of this group possible: from the experiments in precedent virtual groups to the collaboration with real life international artists. Secondly, I would like to analyze the marketing strategies of the two main entities that created the group: Riot Games and Riot Music Group, from creative to promotional aspects. Finally, I would like to point out the synergies between K/DA as part of the music business and League of Legends as representing the video game industry, and how they can be taken as particular examples of a business strategy to be applied to the music industry, in need of innovative, but sustainable, models.

My research takes the form of a case study based on data from the main music charts following the release of the first single of the group and the production of the EP in 2020. I researched details about the marketing strategies applied to push the phenomenon, through analysis of the limited events created online, real-life experiences, social media pages and the broader media presence. I finally researched through online updated literature and future forecasted trends to gain a theoretical base for current media industries trends and business models.

Presentation of the K/DA Group and History

“This was the most involved music project we’ve ever done”, said Toa Dunn, head of Riot Music Group, part of Riot Games, in an interview with Variety magazine (Crecente, 2018). The topic of the interview was the virtual group K/DA, a virtual phenomenon born out of the League of Legends universe. League of Legends is a multiplayer online game developed by the company Riot Games. In the scoring system utilized in the game, K/DA means “Kills, Deaths and Assists”, making the name of the virtual group a tribute to its parent game. The characteristics of the components of the group are also largely derived from the characteristics of their League of Legends version. The champions in question are Ahri, Akali, Evelynn and Kai’Sa, covering the role of singers or rappers, and together they constitute the virtual group K/DA. When we talk about the real-life group composition, Ahri and Akali were originally voiced by Miyeon and Soyeon respectively, members of the south Korean multinational girl group (G)I-dle. They were joined by Madison Beer and Jaira Burns, for the voices of Evelynn and Kai’Sa. In this project we can see how Riot put together talents that would have never had the chance to come together otherwise.

At the beginning of K/DA’s history, in 2018, the band was being used as a promotional tool to

1. Buy skins¹ in the game for the champions first present in the group.
2. Gain public for the World Championship to be held in 2018.

The biggest performance of the group up to now is the one at the League of Legends World Championship in South Korea 2018, where K/DA, both real talent and projected avatars, debuted on stage. To prepare for the 2018 World Championship performance the music video for the song “Pop/Stars” was created, fostered by the interest of many in the creative team at Riot in further pursuing the project.

It all started from the demo, which led to the identification of what K/DA really is. From the very beginning, the team made sure to explore with many influences aside from K-pop, one of them being Hip Hop. The demo further helped identify every element of the group, from the live performances to the skins and the actual content needed to perfect their visuals. The people working on K/DA were divided by projects, such as skins, campaign and of course music teams. They all came together in order to create a new identity for the group, and not merely reiterate the Pop/Stars concept introduced for the champion Ahri in 2013.

The project was born as a one-off, however it soon started turning into something very different. Considerable effort was put into the first World Championship interaction between the fans and the characters out of the League of Legends Universe. Patrick Morales, creative director of Riot Games, acknowledges the focus on the group also given the fact that it represents a kind of mascot for the League of Legends to foreign eyes, that would thus interact first with Riot Games through K/DA, assuming they are in the awareness phase of the customer segmentation, where they still do not know the end product, the game itself.

The music video for Pop/Stars was released on November 3rd, 2018. With the release, Riot tapped into the audience that had not been reached before. The video gathered 13 million views in the first 2 days after the Pop/Stars single was published online. After less than a month, it had gathered 89 million views. The music video in question has, as of today, 468.7 million views on YouTube².

The project had various points of excellence, first of all musical. There is a reasonable explanation to this, and that is the trial-and-error period, since Riot had experimented with other songs meant to become pop hits, but without having the same appeal to the wider audience. The second strength element is definitely the visual one, followed by another which is the appeal of the members of the group themselves.

Riot Games has a background proof in being successful at musical soundtracks created specifically for League of Legends and the correlated annual World Championship. Many verticals in the company were hit, from the game itself to community groups, as said by Viranda Tantula, creative lead on the project. The group was able to attract an audience far wider than the game’s players and connoisseurs. Some of these reached the point of conversion that Riot Games set as their goal. In fact, some of the newest audience was then attracted into starting to play the game. The ones already playing inside the League platform were attracted by a new music genre. K/DA went from promotional tool to pure fan experience and income source in itself for Riot Games. This was made possible by the collaboration with Riot Music Group, who took care of putting together musical tracks. Together, they created Augmented Reality performances and social media campaigns in order to build the group and fortify its promotion. Patrick Morales was the creative lead behind the “Pop/Stars” music video, and creative director at Riot Music Group. Jamelle Jimenez was the Skins lead for K/DA in the game and Toa Dunn is the Head of Riot Music Group. The latter mentioned that there was a certain amount of time and effort needed to care for each song appropriately (Summers, 2020).

The entire team recognized about the creative process that there is an incredible amount of work that can be done and details that can be added when working with a virtual world. Patrick Morales declared that for Akali they put together sequences of real-life female rappers in order to find the perfect moves for her part in the music video. A capturing process of the motions for the characters was done with each real-life artist. Thus, the entire project represented a very exciting and unique experience from the real-life musicians’ perspective as well.

The champions that would form K/DA were not chosen simultaneously. Ahri was the first one to be chosen in order to have a link to the 2013 Popstar skin released for the champion. At the moment of Ahri’s character definition, it was already confirmed that the 2018 World Championship would take place in South Korea, where fans loved the character of Ahri and the previous story of her becoming a popstar. Then followed Evelyn, the obvious counterpart given her darkest characteristics contrasting the colorful Ahri. Then followed Akali, the one who was already undergoing rebranding, so the chaotic rebellious side would fit well the rapper character of the group. Finally, the skins team led by Janelle chose Kai’Sa. This composition was based on something that in the music industry is very important. By having a group composed by well-defined archetypes it would be way easier for people to relate easily and clearly to one or another member. “From a product perspective, each champion had to fill a distinct role”, says Janelle Jimenez (Won, 2020). Toa Dunn revealed that the song “Pop/Stars” itself was already written having the individual members in mind, making it easier to divide the song into each one of its parts.

On the League of Legends universe-focused website, the backstories of the four group members were presented under an interview format, bringing them on the same level of reality as their fans. On the same website, the biographies of the in-game characters are inserted. Evelynn is a demon in the League universe, in particular a demon who charms using the seduction power in a female and very attractive form, in order to feast on the pain of the ones who succumb to her. This is the only way for her to feel something. Ahri is a fox-like creature searching for her own place in the world. She feeds on human emotions, in particular memories and insights, and is also capable of making humans feel relief. Akali is a trained assassin descending from a family that has as sole objective that of keeping the balance of their land. Kai’Sa was once an ordinary girl who mistakenly awoke the Void, becoming part of it.

The success in the charts

K/DA’s highly successful debut single “Pop/Stars” was a mix of Korean and western pop. In fact, the decision of Riot creators was to incorporate EDM to give the track a western sound. “Pop/Stars” became number 1 in the iTunes K-pop chart and number 2 in the Pop chart. It also reached number 1 on the K-Pop chart on Apple music in the US and number 5 on the Pop chart. On November 13th, 2018, “Pop/Stars” eventually reached number 1 on Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart, reaching a total number of 242.8 million streams (Crecente, 2018). This latter chart includes international influence with a much higher consideration compared to the general Digital Song Sales chart, where the song hit number 10, same as in the Pop Digital Song Sales chart. “Pop/Stars” positioned at number 75 on the UK Official Singles Downloads Chart Top 100 on the week of November 9th-15th, 2018. It also reached number 17 on the UK Official Independent Singles Chart Top 50 on the week of November 16th-22nd, 2018. Finally, the song also topped the UK Music K-Pop charts.

After an analysis of the Top 200 Spotify Charts for both 2018 and 2019, for Canada and US, we can see that here, where we have the largest market for the music industry from a western perspective, the song “Pop/Stars” appeared as seen in the Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2, showing the track position per date and daily streams per date respectively. Its peak position was at number 62 in Canada and at number 147 in the US. It is interesting to notice how in the US, the song made fewer appearances, showing a higher turnover in the chart, but also more streams, which could be due to bigger appeal or a larger area/population making use of the streaming platform.

On November 6th, 2020, the EP “All out” was published, after gaining the status of most anticipated release of the year, promoted by the single “More”, whose video was released on October 28th, and gathered 100 million views on YouTube. “All Out” is an extended play composed by five tracks. It was released by Riot in collaboration with Stone Music Entertainment³. The “creators” behind the product, K/DA, started being defined as a supergroup. The release was also simultaneous to the appearance of a new member of the group, Seraphine, voiced by Lexie Liu, a Chinese singer and songwriter. However, she remains an unofficial member. On the EP, each one of the members, including Seraphine, results as a producer of one song.

If the single “Pop/Stars” was already a mix of western and eastern music culture it was because relying on the easy appeal of K-pop would not have been challenging enough for Riot Music Group. This belief is evident in the K/DA album as well. But the team did a satisfying job and the EP reached number 176 on Billboard 200 during the week of November 20th, 2020. In 2020 All Out made Billboard’s The 25 Best Pop Albums of 2020: Staff Picks ’ list. It reached number 1 on Billboard’s US Heatseekers Albums chart and number 5 on Billboard’s US World Albums chart. “More” became number 23 in the UK Official Independent Singles Chart Top 50 in the week of November 6th-12th, 2020. Still in the UK Official Independent Singles Chart Top 50, “The Baddest”, previously published on August 27th, scored number 18 during the week of September 4th-10th, 2020. Both “The Baddest” and “More” reached number 1 on Billboard World Digital Song Sales. On July30th, 2021, it has been announced that the RIAA⁴ has awarded this year the virtual group with the Gold Record, specifically for the “Pop/Stars” music video. This will surely prompt Riot into fostering the music creation for K/DA even more.

Virtual Beings and the power of Storytelling

K/DA are not the first virtual elements to gather incredible worldwide success. Even though it is not clear what character officially gave birth to the phenomenon, what have been defined the Virtual Beings are now increasing in numbers in almost all media spheres. Hatsune Miku is probably the first virtual super star, J-pop superstar to be precise. Developed in 2007 by the software company Crypton Future Media Inc., she reached such a high level of success and such a big fandom that was able to give worldwide tours, performing her original music, open for artists such as Lady Gaga and perform on the American TV show Late Night with David Letterman.

Lil Miquela is on the other hand a very famous Instagram influencer launched in 2016, counting today a following of 3 million. She was created by the digital company Brud, together with other virtual social influencers such as Miquela’s friend Bermuda. As her real-life colleagues, she gained massive viral success on the platform thanks to collaborations with high fashion brands and her own musical projects, including features with important artists. The appearance of virtual influencers is in fact something that benefits the companies employing them from a monetary perspective. This is because less human roles are then necessary to perform the influencers’ roles. Furthermore, they can leverage on the kind of content specifically created for the virtual entity and have more control over their marketing strategy.

Lil Miquela is an extreme example of marketing automation, given that she is a computer­generated influencer with 3 million followers on Instagram and 269 thousand subscribers on YouTube. She was created by the company named Brud, a transmedia company who has been in the shadow since the beginning of Miquela’s success. Only this summer, they launched an official website and decided to open themselves to the public.

On top of her influencing career, Miquela is also a musician, with 12 singles already out under LilMiquela Recs and Brud Records. Furthermore, she has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on the Spotify platform. On her social media pages, and YouTube channel, she recently started to dive into her more personal “programmed memories” to learn about her own programmed past and expand her automated consciousness.

The AI generated musician still has some competition, since AI artists are really nothing new. On July 29th this year a virtual artist accomplished something that is a first for the virtual beings. She signed a deal with a major record label, something no other virtual persona had ever done before. We are talking about Whet Records, the Asian label that Warner created in China earlier this year, which is mainly focused on the dance genre. This was particularly chosen given the stronger link to innovation and openness to technology compared to other music genres. The name of the virtual being is Ha Jiang, already famous in China and Japan. She is a fashion icon that Warner plans to pair with songwriters and producers to collaborate on new music under the deal, as Jon Serbin, CEO of Warner Music Greater China, declared (Ingham, 2021). The goal is to make her known to a much bigger audience than the one it already attracts in China, thus amplifying a solid first fan base.

Following Serbin’s thoughts, this integration opens numerous opportunities for the human artists as well as for the virtual ones, given the high number of creatives and other experts in the music industry that will collaborate on the music production.

One key aspect mentioned by Serbin in an interview with Music Business Worldwide is that virtual idols, as he calls them, will highly benefit to the expansion of the Chinese music market. The rise of virtual idols has of course already accelerated the success of the preexisting virtual beings, given that more attention was shifted towards this digital trend.

To mention what can be considered an extreme example, Factory New is a virtual record label, with a roster only composed by virtual artists. The first signed virtual artist they acquired was someone who gained his fame on TikTok, following thus a common trend for today’s music industry. Again, differently from K/DA, FN Meka, this the name of the AI rapper, is completely computer generated, including his lyrics. His voice, on the other hand, is lent to him by a human. The AI technology developed by the company is in fact able to analyze successful songs of a specific genre and after this, it can recommend the right elements for the creation of a new music piece, in all its spectrum: from lyrics to the melody, leaving the voice as the only element requiring human input. Factory New is specifically creating celebrities that will succeed in a data driven world, on social media specifically. “If fans only ever see their favorite artists on screens anyway, then what difference does it make if those artists are real people or avatars?” says co-founder of the company, Anthony Martini (Stassen, 2021). Automation will also be linked to the variety of new creative possibilities, since it already showed some successful examples, through Travis Bott, AI alter ego of the famous rapper Travis Scott, and Daddy’s car, a Beatles inspired song created by an AI.

Circling back to Riot Games, the history of the virtual bands at the company starts way before K/DA. In their first projects, the creatives at Riot were inspired by Gorillaz, that was in fact a first, very successful experiment, in the virtual bands’ realm. In 2014 Riot itself started working in this untapped field, with the creation of Pentakill, their first heavy metal virtual band who published 2 albums before 2021. On September 2nd, 2021, it was announced that Riot would market the Pentakill’s comeback with a new album through a virtual interactive concert. The concert was streamed live on September 8th, thanks to a partnership with Wave, a virtual entertainment company. They previously performed, through augmented reality, at the opening ceremony for the 2021 LCS Mid-Season Showdown, another tournament organized for League of Legends. The members of the band will also soon be given a new in-game skin.

The group members are of course part of the League Universe, as well as Sona, who is another League Champion that was transformed into a DJ. In 2019 True Damage was born. In the metaverse storyline it was actually born thanks to Akali, K/DA’s rapper.

The biggest innovation later inserted by Riot in the creation of the K/DA group is the insertion of the fictional element. In fact, the virtual groups that existed way before K/DA never had such a specific and complete insertion in the real world, creating personal backstories and existing as characters on the same level of the audience. K/DA live stories in the real world and exist at the same time in a parallel universe in the game. This is then completed by their activities on social media accounts.

Marketing strategy and music strategy: a success story impacting two industries

In 2019, there was not much to see, or hear, of K/DA. Riot’s focus had shifted towards another group part of their musical roster: True Damage. The fact that Riot was calmly working on another musical project proves how the company did not expect that K/DA’s single would gather the incredible amount of success it did. True Damage were soon to host a very important performance at the League of Legends World Championship, taking place in Paris. The real-life group members would perform the song “Giants”, accompanied on stage by their animated counterparts making an appearance by the means of Holograms. If Riot wanted to leverage on the spark that rose around K/DA, the efforts of the company were to be soon redirected from these other existing projects, but this decision implied the need for more time for a new K/DA project to come up. After the True Damage performance in Paris, as Toa Dunn, head of Riot Music Group explained, the company decided to focus again on the “Pop/Stars” fictional creators (Summers, 2020). To prove the new focus on the promising project, during the World Championship Riot posted an animated video explaining the K/DA concept and how it all started. The video was posted on the League of Legends official YouTube account.

In the case of K/DA, the company had the willingness to try something bigger and different than usual. They finally decided releasing an EP. To create a unique album, Riot Music Group had to think about the creative elements of the five tracks included in All Out, without falling into the K-pop stereotypes, risking of being a mere copy of the latest successful trends. On one side, they recognized that they didn’t have the capabilities of keeping up with that area of the music industry, characterized by extremely high speed. On the other hand, this uncertainty led to the decision of leveraging on the genre-blend that would later end up characterizing the group.

Among the many talents who collaborated on the EP, Bea Miller and Wolftyla represented the western talent on the track “The Baddest”. Lexie Liu joined the group for “More”. In the third track, “Villain”, the group collaborated with Kim Petras. Alun and Annika Wells joined for the fourth and fifth track respectively, with Bekuh Boom present on both. This is proof of one very unique element of the K/DA success: it is very easy to rotate talents.

On October 12th, 2020, Riot released new skins for all members of the group, including Seraphine, confirming later that she would officially become a League of Legends champion. On October 30th, 2020, Riot made several “event passes” and other exclusive content available inside their various games⁵, to further advertise the launch of the new album project. They also made use of offline advertisement, by setting up interactive billboards, through the use of integrated QR codes, in places known in Seoul for being hotspots when it comes to superstar advertising. The company also prepared K/DA events specifically for the games’ promotion.

On October 31st, 2020, the band performed at the World Championship held in Shanghai. The concert was a combination of virtual and physical. Eventually, the real-life performers couldn’t be present, but this only turned into an opportunity for the virtual members to shine during the augmented reality performance. Some criticized the Shanghai exhibition, viewed as a disappointment. In fact, the 2018 ceremony is still considered to be the highest standard set by Riot Games for the World Championship up to now.

The initial promotion of the EP was going to be focused on again traditional elements of promotion used in the music industry, such as festivals and real-life campaigns. But this initial strategy was forcefully changed due to the Coronavirus outbreak. During these times, Riot Music Group was informed that a music-based League of Legends Champion called Seraphine was to be developed. As a result, the social media campaign that eventually promoted the album combined two reveals: a new EP and a new member of the group. This kind of media promotion proved to work well enough in times of uncertainty.

For the album All Out, online advertising was also used by the company, in an unconventional way. Compared to other traditional social media campaigns, this was a multi-part campaign, which started on Twitter and Instagram on June 26th, 2020, with Seraphine’s newly created accounts. In the beginning, the mystery element was used since Seraphine was not immediately presented as a new League Champion. She followed indeed the reverse path compared to the existing K/DA members. Seraphine was first introduced in the real-life dimension, and secondly in the in-game world of Runeterra. With her, the Riot team had the most potential to build a background story for one of the group members right away. At the beginning, it was not an immediate success. To make the strategy seem as organic as possible, Riot decided that the accounts were first to be found, which took some time. After that happened, fans started connecting her to the League of Legends Metaverse. On August 20th ,2020 the K/DA media accounts were launched, being still disconnected from Seraphine’s, until the next day when she posted a cover of “Pop/Stars”. When the single “The Baddest” was launched, Seraphine’s account acted as a promotional platform as well, with the character further posting about the new release. The Riot team obviously wanted to create engagement in this social media interactive promotional campaign by putting clues and small details in the accounts, that could eventually lead to linking the group and the singer. It was an alternate reality game, like the kinds that can be found in interactive series, such as SKAM⁶ or Artificial Next⁷, the latter one aired entirely on Twitch, a video live streaming service with a deep focus on gaming and esports. On September 4th, the campaign led to K/DA announcing that Seraphine would be featured on one of their tracks, after they fictionally discovered her on social media, just like the rest of the world.

Seraphine’s profile drew criticism because she posted about her mental health struggles. This marketing technique wasn’t fully appreciated by professionals of the media sector. It was especially criticized by Gita Jackson, writer at Vice⁸. She defined Seraphine’s social media accounts and her posting about very deep psychological struggles a marketing move "beyond perverse". Some of the criticism was linked to the complete lack of context. The social profile was in fact being used during a global pandemic, but the posts seemed at times very inconsiderate of the circumstances. Morales later declared that the story had taken a much unintended turn in the narrative and perception (Haasch, 2020).

Despite some media criticism, fans of the group quickly started to act as traditional music fans, connecting socially with the single members of the group. That’s why in the new album, Riot Music Group tried to customize the songs based on personal characteristics, background, and aspirations belonging to each one of its members.

“What was essentially some creative promotional marketing could be the forefront of an interesting new branch of pop” (Lockyer, 2018) . The success of K/DA’s music has many key elements to be discussed. Riot crafted a perfect strategy for the release of the anticipated album, and it had to deal with a global pandemic in between the release of the first single Pop/Stars and the 5 tracks EP All Out.

A first peculiarity to be touched upon is the core of the project: K/DA is a virtual group. Having virtual members instead of human beings guarantees a level of flexibility inexistent in real life groups. The power of storytelling and reality of the group were brought to the extreme when the social media account of Seraphine was born, and her story evolved under the assumption that the group discovered her on a social platform, same way as the fans did. Here, Riot Games was able to build the narrative to their own taste and advantage.

The storytelling that Riot was able to implement into this project contributed to another fundamental element to keep in mind: the emotional appeal of music. Music has the power to go beyond the consumption of the content, and it becomes part of the audience and viewers’ life. Music is used in social relationships; therefore, it has always been a strong marketing tool, ensuring extension of the content beyond the mere consumption point. Music becomes in this way a strong support element, benefitting the marketing campaigns and ultimately becoming increasingly used in marketing strategies in every industry (Sheinkop, 2016).

Eric Sheinkop studied the music industry and its relation to the other industries by performing twenty case studies and interviews with industry experts, helping in understanding how to create the perfect formula for music as a driver of bulletproof marketing. Currently, the marketing power of music is helping drive business results in all the other industries, especially in terms of brand awareness stage and purchase/ conversion stage. This allows the music industry to survive, creating synergies and allowing the artists behind the creative product to earn money. Integrating music into marketing campaigns is what this author has been working on for fifteen years. In his studies, he found that the reason why music constitutes an effective driver for marketing success is very intuitive: storytelling (Sheinkop, 2016).

In our example, Riot was not only able to leverage on the storytelling to advertise the upcoming release of All Out but was also able to leverage on the album itself for their ultimate goal: to encourage a new audience to become League of Legends consumers. Riot took a step in the Social Empowerment strategical field⁹ to become and stay relevant with their new product. This concept is related to getting to know and exploiting your consumers’ passions to deliver a higher value of product. Social Empowerment is also the phenomenon that pushed music strategy to be accepted and capitalized on by brands (Sheinkop, 2016).

Gamers are avid music consumers, as found by Sheinkop in his book Return of the Hastle: the art of marketing with music (2016). Something related to music, that could be streamed and linked with the main characters of the League of Legends Universe, did not seem like a bad idea at the time of the new virtual experimentation for Riot, who probably acquired a good amount of knowledge about the industry before diving into the project. When creating the group, Riot was aware that games need music and music needs promotion. Therefore, they wanted to create the perfect music project with the album All Out, to properly compete with the real-life music artists and real music labels. This contributed to a third factor of success: treating Riot Games’ music as a real Riot Games product.

In fact, for Riot Games, there was much more than brand recognition in play and the music created for True Damage first and K/DA second became a product in and of itself. Patrick Morales talked about production values in the video production and when it came to the final audience, he mentioned the intention to create something that would appeal to the vast majority of the music consumers (Won, 2018). Here, the concept of two-sided market in music takes an interesting turn as well, focusing on consumers of both music and video games on one side. Luckily, today the entertainment values perceived by those two groups of consumers are extremely correlated. On the other side, the brand power belongs to Riot Games, League of Legends and the characters themselves, towards which the new public must be attracted.

In the past two decades, charts such as Billboard Top 100 have featured more and more songs that are the result of featuring among artists, most of the times coming from different genres (Exhibit 3). In the research done by Andrea Ordanini, sampling on Billboard Hot 100 songs, the likelihood of reaching the top of the chart was higher for the songs presenting featured artists (18.4%) compared to the songs that did not (13.9%). The study also shows that the higher the Distance among the genres of the present artists the higher the popularity of the song, measured by the probability of entering the top charts, but only up until a certain point (Ordanini, Nunes and Nanni, 2018). For example, the ones making the top 10 in Billboard Top 100 are in fact most likely to be featuring collaborations. The ones positioned higher in the chart are the ones with the higher genre differences among the artists.

In terms of music production, the All Out album was born with the necessity and possibility to include many features. As mentioned before, it allowed for unexpected and diverse collaborations, spanning many genres, given the opportunity to rotate real-life artists when voicing the group members. In terms of audience development strategy, by combining those fans that are labeled as omnivores (White, 2020), because they listen to pretty much everything in terms of genre, and the loyal fans to respectively each of the artists present on the collaboration, hybrid songs were obtained. They eventually had a very vast appeal, representing a victorious move.

Furthermore, Riot has been smart enough in matching to the best of possibilities the international collaborations they have been able to attract with the in-game personas, in order to create a product that suited the virtual group and their counterpart characters and roles in the League of Legends universe. The simple partnership with fixed artists would have been riskier, since they or their music might not be aligned with the game’s identity.

The last element of success that deserves attention is the fact that video games are in line with the innovation needed in the music industry. Right now, the main access that consumers have when it comes to digital music is in the streaming era mainly linked to streaming platforms. One of the biggest challenges mentioned in The Awakening: the music industry in the digital age, a book written by Mark Mulligan and published by the MIDiA Research company, is the fact that the music industry has to create a real digital product and experience to be linked to the nowadays static audio file we encounter most of the times on these platforms. Mark Mulligan already hypothesized the emergence of telecommunication companies as music players or at least allies of the music industry (2015).

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¹ Skins are alternate in-game appearances that can be bought for the champions of League of Legends.

² Figure dates to November 3rd, 2021, 3 years after the video release.

³ Stone Music Entertainment is a South Korean privately held company.

⁴ Recording Industry Association of America.

⁵ League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, League of Legends: Wild Rift, and Teamfight Tactics.

⁶ SKAM is a Norwegian tv series, belonging to the teen drama genre. Its main feature is the interactivity with the audience throughout its episodes.

⁷ Artificial Next is a Twitch Original series belonging to the sci-fi genre. The audience is allowed and encouraged to interact with the characters throughout each episode.

⁸ Vice is a Canadian magazine focused on arts, culture, and news.

⁹ The Social Empowerment concept was Mentioned by Eric Sheinkop in Return of the Hastle: the art of marketing with music, 2016, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.