Kamshi Ahmed
“Most musicians, one of our dreams, one our goals – it’s not the Grammys, it’s not the Oscars – it’s to get a song on Fifa, man.”
That’s Femi Koleoso, from Ezra Collective, on why getting on Fifa – now known as EA FC – is such a big deal.
Each year, around a hundred songs get selected for the soundtrack of the world’s favourite football video game.
But how do they get chosen from the countless acts desperate to make their name on it?
“It’s a brutal question to answer,” EA’s president of music, Steve Schnur, told me, as he gave the BBC a rare peek behind the curtain of how the game studio makes its decisions.
“We go through thousands and thousands of songs,” he says
“At the very beginning, I was flying around like a madman, looking everywhere for the next great thing.
“Now, humbly speaking, everybody wants to be in EA FC, so people come to us.”
‘My boss is the player’
But of course, the process is not really about the acts – but the gamer.
“I can’t always base it on who we like or who we have history with,” Mr Schnur said.
“Ultimately, my boss is the player, the person that bought the copy of the game, sometimes with their parents’ money.”
He told me the tune has to “fit a tone”, though there is no specific genre.
“Even if a song doesn’t end up in the game, there’s many songs that you probably hear on Radio 1 where you go, that’s an EA FC band, or that’s an EA FC song,” he told me.
“They can be popular – it can be Skepta, it can be Dua Lipa – but we also want to make sure it’s that band from York that you haven’t heard of yet.”
But, if you’re that unheard of band, how does EA even find out that you exist?
Simply put, a lot of digging.
“There’s a band from Yorkshire, they’re 15 and 16 years old, that I came across online recently, and I reached out to them and said I’m Steve Schnur from EA Sports FC,” he said.
“They sent me these Instagram messages back immediately, saying, ‘is this a joke?'”
Exciting for the band – which Mr Schnur would not name – but he says it’s a thrill for him too.
“Nothing’s better than reaching out to that band and literally saying, out of the blue, ‘hey, I want to put you in the game this year’,” he said.
For the bands, it can be transformative – for acts including Kasabian and Catfish and the Bottlemen, getting exposure on Fifa helped them go on to become household names.
