E-Mail This Article to a Friend Aural dilemma When customizable soundtracks compete with original game scores, which will consumers choose? BY CHRIS DAHLEN

Here are some gameplay tips: if you want to beat Halo, turn on your stereo and crank Queen. To heighten the effect of moody games like Half-Life 2, try some static-y German laptop stuff, for that half-human futuristic-decay effect. And with Burnout 3: Takedown, go with ’80s new wave: every time I hear The The’s "Uncertain Smile," I will always win the race. Always.

Nothing rushes endorphins into your blood like playing a game like Burnout 3 with your favorite music as the score. Thanks to a feature in the Xbox version of the game, you can turn off the skater-rock soundtrack that ships with the game and switch to songs that you've ripped to the console’s hard drive. Picking your own music is the coolest part of the game – so cool, in fact, that Microsoft just announced that the next generation Xbox will require every game to let you use your soundtracks instead of its own.

But Microsoft picked a strange time to make that announcement. In the past couple of years, the music industry has taken a shine to gaming as a new way to break bands and move singles. Artists fight to get their songs in front of Steve Schnur, an MTV and Capitol Records alumnus who is now Electronic Arts’ Worldwide Executive of Music. (EA is so plugged into the music biz that last fall it opened its own record label, Next Level Music.) Schnur has claimed that Madden NFL 2003 broke Godsmack, and that FIFA 2003 broke Avril Lavigne in Europe.

Video games are just as glad to use big names. Electronica artist Amon Tobin wrote the music for Ubisoft's upcoming Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, the Beastie Boys – who can’t possibly crack six feet tall – are unlockable characters in NBA Street V3, and the Black Eyed Peas brought their hip-hop and their on-screen likenesses to The Urbz: Simz in the City. And 50 Cent will actually star in his own game, titled, I kid you not, 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

"Over the last few years we saw how new artists were being broken in video games, [where] traditionally radio was the way to break artists," says Shahid Khan, Managing Director of Media and Entertainment for the business-consulting firm BearingPoint, Inc. "My belief is that the expansion is going to be around soundtracks, and that’s also going to become a significant revenue stream for music companies."

Has the record business shown any hesitation about jumping into this bloodthirsty, violence-sensationalizing medium? "I think there are certain artists that would flourish in an environment that has some kind of violence in it. Large record companies have something for everything, right?"

Licensing the songs and cashing in on the soundtrack is just the start. Your on-line games will hook into marketplaces to find, buy, or recommend music: when you hear a song you like, you’ll only be a couple clicks away from paying for it. "Commerce is going to be the next revenue stream that the video-game guys will be looking at," says Khan. "And music is a logical place to start."

Those are only some of the ideas. As always in the field of digital music, you can picture a million ways to combine licensing, distribution, and cross-product selling – except that I don’t want to imagine it, because I’m busy customizing my own soundtracks. And there we run into an interesting clash.

It’s surprising, and wholly attributable to its status as the 8000-pound gorilla, that Microsoft could force game makers to allow you to chuck their carefully-crafted (or expensively-licensed) soundtracks in favor of your own records. You can play ’Nam-era rock music over World War II shooters, or listen to Clarence Carter’s "Strokin’" with a family-rated program. You blew $50 on the game, you can do whatever you want!

You’d expect a soundtrack artist to object to this, but when I spoke with the acclaimed composer, Jesper Kyd, he just seemed unimpressed. Kyd has composed for video games since 1993, recently winning the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for "Best Original Music" for Hitman: Contracts. "Why are they making such a big deal out of it?" he asks. "Are they trying to scare people like me? I don’t understand that. Does anybody really care that you can put that music in there yourself? You can [already] go in there and stop the music and then turn up your stereo. It’s not like this is a revolutionary feature."

Kyd prides himself on crafting scores for an interactive experience, and he believes that the music is indispensable. "When you play a game from a single-player viewpoint, where you have a story you progress through, you’re going to need a soundtrack to follow with that. When you sneak around a corner, the music still needs to scare you," he says. "There has always been music, and it’s always had an effect. It’s not just been there solely to enjoy; it’s also been there as a function, and video games are going to need music for that function. So it’s basically like a movie, where you need music to make you feel good, bad, to make you feel sad, happy – we’re not going to be able to present all those atmospheres if we just put Iron Maiden on in the background."

At this point, Microsoft’s true motives are unclear. In his speech at this year’s Game Developers’ conference, Microsoft Vice President J Allard pitched customizable soundtracks as an appeal to "Generation Remix," along with several other customizable features. Maybe the feature will give you more incentive to buy music through the Xbox, or encourage you to integrate your Xbox more tightly with the rest of your A/V system. When you combine music and gaming in one device, you start to see the Xbox as the hub of your entire media center. It can already replace your CD, DVD, and MP3 media server, and by Xbox 3 it’ll take over your thermostats, your sex life, and your garage-door opener. By the fourth generation it’ll live on a chip in your head and tell you how to vote … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Even with the few games that offer the feature today (like Burnout 3), it’s not clear how many people use it. Khan is skeptical that consumers will take to it. "If you’re in the push-entertainment mode, where you’re consuming entertainment that others have created for you, most people like to consume it the way it was intended to be consumed.… The soundtrack is selected based on the mood of the game, and that’s the experience that they’re creating," says Khan. "I’m all for providing options for consumers, but I’m not sure if it’s going to fly."

But not every game soundtrack is a work of art, and if Ashlee Simpson writes a theme song for a game, you’d better believe people will switch it off. In a way, the technology pits three different forces against each other: art, commerce, and the right of consumers to do whatever they want. Want to bet on who’ll win?