About Toa Dunn
Disruptors and curious minds! We’ve got a barnstorming episode for you on music strategy for video games and how to build the interdisciplinary teams to make it a reality!
How do game companies like Riot Games think, build and execute their music strategy? How did League of Legends give you virtual bands like Pentakill and K/DA… and more importantly, why did they do it?
🎮 Music, development, distribution, A&R, marketing, storytelling. In-house musicians, DJs, bands. Video games are the perfect example of interdisciplinary teams working together to take entertainment into the future. And it is a complex and fine edge getting the balance and trust right. Without it there is no Pentakill, no e-sports, no Fortnite.
On this episode of Thinking on Paper, we speak to Toa Dunn, former head of music at Riot Games. For over a decade, Toa managed the music strategy and developed a new core business model around music experiences, helping to take League Of Legends and the virtual bands created from characters in game – to 200 million monthly players. Now he is taking that vast well of experience and focusing on generating meaningful impact across entertainment and technology, by levelling up teams and individuals.
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Quotes From Toa Dunn
“For more narrative driven games music can have more of an upfront kind of role in that experience. So the music strategy can be quite different.”
“We started off kind of trying to figure out what music's role could be in League of Legends.”
“I approached it from the lens of how music could add to the experience.”
“I used to be nervous because you never know if the players are actually going to like what you're about to deliver until they get it in their hands and they play.”
“Our first band was Pentakill, a heavy metal band.”
"We treated them like a real band and that was kind of an Experiment. But it resonated really well with our players.”
“K/DA did not exist, there were many characters to select from so we went through this creative and strategic process to figure out the roles (and characters) of this band.”
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Follow Toa Dunn On Twitter (X)
As someone who has logged a good number of hours into Crab Rave
— Toa Dunn (@toadunn) January 10, 2024
This would go so hard with the Crab Rave music@riotgamesmusic https://t.co/ZShAxS8Ssv
💡💡What if there was a band like #KDA , but you as content creator could participate in the story. Would this be a fun “experiment?”
— Toa Dunn (@toadunn) December 21, 2023
There is nothing like the gaming community… nothing! pic.twitter.com/ffgASC1BSv
— Toa Dunn (@toadunn) December 8, 2023
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