MusicEXP is a weekly newsletter exploring the intersection of video games and music, edited by Mat Ombler. Subscribe to receive weekly round-ups of the latest music and gaming stories, and monthly deep dives into trending topics. For more music and gaming news, make sure you listen to the GXM Podcast, which I co-host with Thomas Quillfeldt.
In brief: bbno$ announced last week that he would perform a virtual concert in the massively popular obstacle-running game on Roblox, +1 Speed Keyboard Escape. Players could register their interest ahead of the performance, which reached more than 11 million sign-ups a few days before the concert took place on 25th July at 11:00 PST.
The event was a hit and peaked at 6,355,764 concurrent players (CCU), but fell short of the world record attempt for “largest music concert in a videogame by a single artist”, held by Bruno Mars for his virtual concert in the Roblox game, Steal a Brainrot, which reached 12.8 million CCU.
Note the wording for “single artist” here, because the largest music concert in a video game currently goes to Fortnite for its Juice WRLD Remix Finale event featuring performances by Snoop Dogg, Ice Spice, and Eminem.
EXP: If you look at the most popular music events and virtual concerts on Roblox, they all have one thing in common: they’re limited-time integrations inside games that are already massively popular.
6.3 million CCU for the bbno$ concert and 12.8 million CCU for Bruno Mars, yet the bespoke Rolling Stones event inside The Block (more on that in the last edition of MusicEXP) struggled to surpass 5000 CCU, which was arguably a much more impressive event.
You can watch the full bbno$ concert here. While the event format was similar to other live concert experiences in Roblox, I do want to highlight the fact that this event was much closer to an actual concert experience, as it was over 30 minutes long and featured more than 15 tracks (including the debut of new material). The Bruno Mars concert only featured two tracks and was less than 10 minutes long.
So how should artists, managers, and labels pursue music activations on Roblox? Do you lump all of your resources into a massive immersive experience like The Rolling Stones did in The Block that plays more like a game, or do you do something more passive, AKA having an avatar of your artist perform a virtual concert in an existing game?
Of course, that depends on your specific KPIs and what you want to achieve. But I do want to draw your attention to something that I’ve noticed about these music events in Roblox and how they compare to similar activations in games like Fortnite.
When Fortnite hosts a massive music activation like Travis Scott, Daft Punk or eminem/Snoop, they become unforgettable cultural moments. The Juice WRLD / Chapter 2 Remix Finale event logged the highest CCU ever reached on Fortnite because music was such an important part of the event.
The performances from artists like eminem, Snoop and Ice Spice were the headline act, not a side event. Players log into Fortnite specifically to check out these events, which is why CCUs often break records. But if you look at the data for a lot of these Roblox games where music events have taken place, the historical CCU peaks aren’t associated with the music. As an example, the all-time CCU for +1 Speed Keyboard Escape was achieved seven days ago with 7.2m CCU.
With the exception of The Rolling Stones event, I think this is because a lot of the music experiences in Roblox are passive, whereas the music events in Fortnite are more immersive (at least the main ones in Battle Royale) and positioned as unmissable moments of culture.
The numbers that artists are able to reach in Roblox integrations are nothing short of mindblowing. I don’t want to take anything away from the fact that bbno$ literally performed to a live audience of 6.3 million players. That’s the biggest show he’s ever played in his life!
But as I said in last week’s write-up of The Stones event, I’d love to see bigger and more immersive music moments in Roblox rather than these quick virtual concert experiences that essentially drop an artist avatar into a game environment with some flashy visuals.
In brief: Live Nation has announced the launch of Music Festival Tycoon, a new Roblox game developed in partnership with Livewire. In the game, players can book artists and build stages as they create and manage their own music festivals. While the official announcement was made last week, the game was launched at the end of 2025 and has reached three million visits since.
According to Live Nation, Music Festival Tycoon opens up “new opportunities for brands to extend their real-world festival sponsorships into Roblox through sponsored stages, custom activations, creator collaborations, and virtual merchandise.” CORTIS was also announced as the first artist to perform a virtual concert in the game, which will launch alongside a partnership with Lollapalooza, who become the first real-world festival to join Music Festival Tycoon.
EXP: This is very clever stuff. I’ve said for a long time that music festivals aren’t making the most of opportunities in video games to make themselves visible all-year-round, so I’m stoked to see Live Nation building an owned experience that basically doubles up as a virtual experience for whatever major music festivals they want to partner with - “Can’t make it down to Lollapalooza? Check out the virtual version in Roblox.”
Music Festival Tycoon already has an established player base behind it and is currently averaging between 20-30k daily visits with session lengths of around nine minutes, according to Romonitor. A tycoon (business simulator) game for a music festival is also a natural pairing, and it helps that tycoon is a very popular genre on Roblox.
The Lollapalooza event kicks off on July 28th. I’ll be jumping into play it over the weekend and will give you an update on figures in the next edition of MusicEXP, so make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already!
In brief: Hololive, a VTuber (virtual YouTuber) agency representing creators such as Gawr Gura, Houshou Marine, and Usada Pekora, has released hololive Dreams, a hybrid rhythm game and role-playing game for PC and mobile. This is Hololive’s first mobile game and its first first-party rhythm game, and it launches with over 150 songs and over 50 Hololive members to collect as characters.
EXP: Mobile games generated $133 billion in 2025, 56% of the video game industry’s total revenue. As the Asia-Pacific region is such a massive market for mobile games, many of the top-grossing music games are based on or feature popular IP in China, Japan, and Korea.
VTubers are also incredibly popular. They make up the vast majority of the most-watched female streamers globally. According to data from Streamcharts, eight of the top 10 female streamers in 2025 were VTubers.
This is a clever IP play from Hololive to capture a profitable section of the music market on mobile devices, and the diverse nature of its talent line-up means this game should appeal to audiences in the West. Hololive has been making a growing push into video games over the last few years, collaborating with games such as Among Us, Sword Art Online, World of Warships and many more.
I haven’t played hololive Dreams yet, but I did reach out to the team at market intelligence firm SensorTower, who shared some data on the game’s performance since launching on 23rd July. The data below covers the game’s launch until Saturday, 25th July.
According to Sensor Tower estimates, HoloLive Dreams has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times since launch.
On launch day, HoloLive Dreams saw ~600k total app downloads and brought in $2 million.
Consumers have spent more than $8.6m on in-app purchases on HoloLive Dreams since launch.
Sensor Tower data shows that HoloLive Dreams’ five largest markets by mobile app downloads since launch are Japan (71%), the US (6%), South Korea (4%), Indonesia (4%) and Taiwan (3%).
HoloLive Dreams’ five largest markets by mobile in-app purchase revenue since launch are Japan (83%), Taiwan (5%), the US (5%), Hong Kong (2%) and South Korea (2%).
This is a great LinkedIn post from Sean Varah, who dives into the details of how and why a Roblox game (Brookhaven) started its own record label. According to Varah, the latest single reached 426k views in four days on DSPs.
More praise for Denshattack (play it!), this time from a Polygon article focusing on a musical boss fight.
Emo math-rock group Daydream Plus have released their latest album on a NES cartridge. NME has the details.
Orchestral rhythm game ‘Maestro’ is heading to the Nintendo Switch. Check out the trailer here.
David Fleming has been announced as the composer behind Marvel’s upcoming Wolverine game.
Danny Kelleher, founder of Laced Records (where I work) spoke to Vinyl Alliance about why the video game music market is booming.
Alpha Nomos is a new hybrid rhythm game that turns instruments into weapons, and it’s coming to Xbox soon.
This is a really thoughtful piece about an iconic music moment in Baldur’s Gate 3 (yes, that moment).
Some great stuff here from Will Freeman, who shares his impressions in The Wand Report on the part-DAW-part-game-part-weird-music-experiment, Offbeat.
50 Cent has revealed he’s managed to convince eminem to write a new track for the upcoming Street Fighter movie.
A popular YouTuber who quit his day job to fulfil his dreams of being a game developer, has released a demo for his upcoming rhythm game, Step Theater.
Phil Bozeman, the vocalist from deathcore outfit Whitechapel, features in the new soundtrack for Doom: The Dark Ages. It’s incredibly heavy.
Any Conker’s Bad Fur Day fans here? Fun fact: Frank Zappa’s son is the one shredding on this track from the Live & Reloaded remake.
Lucasfilm has released the first single from its upcoming Star Wars game, Zero Company, composed by Gordy Haab.
Thank you, Beatportal, for making me aware of an incredible new trance album released for the video game, Hypnotiles. Listen to the soundtrack here.
Wiley has spent the last couple of weeks talking about how important video game music has been to grime music. Documentary maker Nick Dwyer adds to the conversation, sharing some footage from his video game music documentary, Diggin’ in the Carts, featuring Flying Lotus, Just Blaze and many more. If you haven’t watched the documentary series, please do so here. It had such a profound impact on me that I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter without it (thank you, Nick!)
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