Steve Schnur: Last News

Jon Burlingame February 2023 will be the first time a composer will walk away with a Grammy for scoring a video game. And many in the creative community are saying “it’s about time.” Game scores have, over the past two decades, become a huge part of the media music landscape. Yet, despite being eligible for music’s highest honor since 1999 (in the film and TV music category), only one game has ever been nominated: Austin Wintory’s landmark score for “Journey,” in 2012. After years of lobbying by game executives and composers alike, in June the Recording Academy announced a new category, the tongue-twister score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media to “recognize excellence in score soundtrack albums comprised predominantly of original scores and created specifically for, or as a companion to, a current video game or other interactive media.”

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Music supervisors behind the songs of “Wicked” and “A Complete Unknown” led the winners at the 15th annual Guild of Music Supervisors Awards on Sunday night. On the TV side, the music supervisors behind “Agatha All Along” and “Baby Reindeer” triumphed.

Roy Trakin Security was tight as a crowd of 500 entertainment industry titans filed through metal detectors and multiple checkpoints into the Beverly Hills house owned by Warner Music Group A&R exec Aton Ben-Horin for the Creative Community for Peace’s sixth annual Ambassadors of Peace event (Variety is a media sponsor). The list of honorees included (pictured above, left to right): TV exec Ben Silverman, Amazon Music’s Phylicia Fant, actor-author-host Mayim Bialik, music business attorney Josh Binder and newly appointed Atlantic Music Group CEO Elliot Grainge. The organization, founded more than a decade ago by veteran publishing executive David Renzer, EA music chief Steve Schnur and MMG Music’s Ran Geffen-Lifshitz, mainly to convince acts to bypass boycott efforts to perform in Israel, has found new relevance since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival.