Your support helps us to tell the story
Martyn Ware, the musician and producer behind British synth-pop bands The Human League and Heaven 17, has claimed he was offered a one-off payment of just £5,700 to have H17’s hit song “Temptation” featured in the new Grand Theft Auto game.
Ware, 68, shared on X/Twitter that he was contacted by his publishers on behalf of Rockstar Games, the studio behind the hit franchise, about the possibility of using the 1983 track in Grand Theft Auto VI.
“Naturally excited about the immense wealth that was about to head my way, I scrolled down to the bottom of the email re the offer...” he wrote.
“It was $7,500 (£5,700), for a buyout of any future royalties from the game, forever...” he continued. “To put this in context, Grand Theft Auto [V] grossed, wait for it... $8.6 BILLION (£761m).”
Ware, who has also produced records for artists including the late Tina Turner, concluded: “Ah, but think of the exposure. Go f*** yourself.”
He later added: “For those claiming H17 should have accepted the extremely low offer for buyout for ‘Temptation’ in GTA6 claiming ‘increased exposure’... An extra one million streams generates each writer a pitiful $1,000 each.”
“Temptation” was a Number Two hit in the UK in 1983 and is considered one of the defining songs of the synth-pop era. It previously featured in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting.
Grand Theft Auto VI is due for release in 2025, almost a decade after its predecessor, and will be the latest installment in one of the biggest-selling video franchises of all time.
A trailer for the game, which was leaked in December last year, smashed a number of world records after it was viewed more than 90 million times in its first day on YouTube.
Music is a major part of the game, as players can cruise around in its fictional vice setting with the radio tuned to popular songs, with different stations offering various genres.
In GTA V, featured songs included Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” and Future’s “How Was It” on Radio Los Santos, while the Non-Stop Pop FM station offered INXS’s Eighties classic “New Sensation”, Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” and “Applause” by Lady Gaga.
Other artists to have songs in the game are Britney Spears, Mis-Teeq, Robyn, Rihanna, Wham!, Phil Collins, Queen and Stevie Wonder.
Responding to Ware’s complaint, Cocteau Twins and Bella Union Records founder Simon Raymonde implored him to reconsider.
“Martyn is it too late to change your mind?” he responded. “GTA had around 440 songs in the last game so really that fee for one (albeit brilliant) song is normal. Might seem low but if they pay $7,500 each then that’s $3.3m on the music alone. The fee [in my honest opinion] is irrelevant.”
He argued that, given 200 million people bought the last game, having a song on the soundtrack could potentially boost streams for an artist by “10 or 20 times what it is now”.
“I see these fees constantly and, low as they are, that really is only a tiny part of what [having your song featured in a game] can do to the awareness of your music and GTA is the game everyone wants,” he added.
However, a follower replied: “Yeah, but $3.3m is going to be a drop in the bucket of the [development] costs. The expected development cost for GTA 6 is projected to be over RDR2, which was $550m, by a good margin. So $650m? That means music would be less than 1 per cent of the budget. That’s low, way low.”
The Independent has contacted Rockstar Games for comment.
