Early on the morning of March 15, 2018, Drake tweeted a link to a live Twitch broadcast, where hip-hop superstar plays in Fortnite with professional player Tyler Blevins, who is called “Ninja”. Over the next few hours, the two would unite through Travis Scott and Pittsburgh Steelers open receiver Juju Smith-Schuster and attract more than 625,000 simultaneous viewers, breaking Twitch’s all-time record and making headlines on CNN, BBC and The Washington Post. .
For Lee Trink, “it was the shot heard all over the world.” The label’s former director (Lava, Atlantic, Virgin and Capitol) and artistic director (Kid Rock) had spent the past two years trying to convince his contacts in the entertainment world of the game’s opportunities, largely without success. “This moment forced other people to rethink their vision of the game in two ways,” he says. “The fact that, one way or another, other people who play video games have an audience of approximately 700,000 people at the same time watching; and the fact that those guys would think so much of a player they were publicly aligning with.
While Trink saw an “aha” moment for the game in general, he also identified a quicker opportunity to sell the story of FaZe Clan, the gaming and eSports collective he had consulted and joined as co-owner/CEO in September 2018. FaZe Clan founded in 2010 through an organization of players who specialize in “tricks” or the search for artistic tactics to film others in Call of Duty, who would record and upload to YouTube under the FaZe ILLCAMS logo. “It’s almost like skateboarding, but in Call of Duty, you jump off a construction and perform tricks as you fall,” says Thomas “FaZe Temperrr” Oliveira, one of the organization’s most sensitive members. “We turned those videos into something like mixtapes, other people were looking ahead every week, and they started getting tens of thousands, then thousands and then millions of perspectives from the beginning.”
Over the past decade, FaZe Clan has gone from posting ILLCAMS on YouTube to being an in-game cultural phenomenon, which quickly fits more than a network of teenagers in basements with nothing bigger to do. The gaming industry has skyrocketed and market analytics company NewZoo expects a global profit of approximately $160 billion in 2020, more than 9% since 2019, with 2.7 billion international players, adding $1 billion in e-sports. That’s more than the combined price of the global film industry ($101 billion in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association), the global recorded music industry ($20.2 billion in 2019, according to IFPI) and the global live music market ($25 billion). Billion, according to Billboard’s estimates), and since the game is already online and remains in houseArray, its price is also largely pandemic-proof. By 2023, NewZoo expects profits to exceed $200 billion and users to exceed $3 billion. The numbers are dier, although due to the relative youth of the online gambling industry and e-sports and the influential nature of collectives like the FaZe Clan, where not all members are equivalent, some potential investors are not entirely convinced of the business. model. Array
FaZe Clan has grown from 30 members to approximately 85 in the following year. Almost part of them are professional players; the other part are the content creators (streamers, vloggers and more), while prominent members, athletes like Smith-Schuster and artists like Lil Yachty, who are not paid, complete the list. FaZe Clan streamers and content creators have individual contracts with a recording artist’s control agreement, and the company gets an explained percentage of the proceeds from associations with the YouTube logo or advertising earnings, while its eSports players have salaried contracts closer to those of professional athletes. (In addition, a small number of FaZe Clan members are percentage shareholders of the company and therefore earn a percentage of the profits).)
Combining a virtual content center, an e-sports collective, a sponsorship logo and a clothing company (each representing about a quarter of the revenue), FaZe Clan and its members have obtained more than 230 million subscribers on their social media platforms, with the collective itself having more than 8 million subscribers to their YouTube account. Its lifestyle videos and game clips accumulate millions of perspectives in a few days, while many of its members attract almost the same number of subscribers, each on their own individual pages.
“I see it, in general, as a new idea,” says Iovine. “They’re content creators, they’re personalities, they’re kind of athletes, they play live. They have all the things I find fun.
Players are also increasingly proud of their hobby and no longer maintain their identity as a secret player, which is helping to boost the band’s popularity. “At first, it might have been a bit of a bad taste for some rappers to communicate about it or provide it, but more and more rappers are starting to play,” says Lil Yachty, who was officially included in the FaZe Clan in December 2018 during her presentation. at rolling loud festival in Los Angeles, where FaZe members presented limited edition FaZe Boat T-shirts in the crowd. “I suppose you’ve realized how lucrative and popular the game is globally. I didn’t make much money from the game, to be honest, but I play anyway. That’s all I do. I don’t argue, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I just play. It’s just my life. That was the case.”
Describing FaZe Clan in undeniable terms leads to a variety of other answers. Trink refers to it as a hybrid of the Los Angeles Lakers and the hypebeast Supreme clothing logo, with the cultural prestige among MTV enthusiasts in its heyday. Iovine says they’re “somewhere between a basketball team and a rock band”; Carter said it reminded him of the “Wu-Tang Clan or the A$AP crowd, and what they were able to do culturally.”
In some ways, FaZe Clan is also what today’s top record labels aspire to: a global entertainment monster with superstar artists on their list, a great marketing device and a great referee that extends to music, film, television, derivatives and events. With platforms like Twitch, which has necessarily made music a vertical sector at the moment on its platform, and Steam playing the role of streaming services, and games like Fortnite serving as a concert hall, the gaming world is starting to look a lot like music. industry as a whole.
“We are all influencers,” says Offset, which was first announced as an investor in August 2019. “Before [the coronavirus], a gaming festival sold a full stadium: 18,000 or 20,000 more people with even more outside. There with music when it reaches hits and numbers.
FaZe Clan’s connection to music goes back to its early days, when members discovered music on YouTube or mixtape sites like Datpiff and asked artists for permission to use their songs in their videos. The band placed Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” in a first music video long before the Grammy Award-winning duo’s climax, and played an early role in the career of rapper Def Jam Logic, who wore a FaZe Clan hoodie in music. Video. for their 2012 song “The Spotlight”. “We put some of the scenes in which he wore the hoodie on our upcoming ILLCAMS, which was our bread and butter series at the time, and the enthusiasts went crazy,” recalls Temperrr, a member of FaZe. “They saw this crossover that had never been done before, and it was special. No other team did that.”
Historically, musicians and actors have ranked in or near the most sensitive entertainment food chain, while players and social media stars have been considered inferior eaters. Faze Clan’s good fortune and the expansion of the gaming industry threaten to change this hierarchy. “Rappers can record a professional $50,000 music video and not record 3 million prospects in 3 months. But those kids can do it in six hours,” says Peter Jidenowo, who ran Juice WRLD before the young star’s sudden death in 2019 and worked with FaZe. Clan in a costume collaboration on Juice’s July 10 album, Legends Never Die. That’s why, he adds, “it’s also vital that the game and the music culture come true.” The way players like FaZe Clan used music in their YouTube videos “was TikTok before TikTok”.
Although it is not imaginable to identify a direct correlation between FaZe Clan’s use of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” in one of his ILLCAMS videos and the song’s presentations on the table, sales and streaming, it should be noted that the bachelor, which debuted on the Billboard Hot One at number 96 on September 15, 2012 had fallen off the chart on October 12 when the ILLCAMS clip was released presented the song. For the week ending October 14, “Thrift Shop” generated 308,000 on-demand broadcasts, one hundred percent more over the past week, and returned to Hot 100 at 96th for the week ending October 27. (The solried continued to spending 4 consecutive weeks at No. 1 as of February 2, 2013.)
And FaZe Clan’s marketing opportunities for artists are also beginning to materialize. On July 6, Interscope revealed that Juice WRLD’s new album would be released that week, an ad that came along with the release of FaZe Clan’s ad collaboration, which was included with the album. Legends Never Die debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 with 497,000 units of equivalent albums, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, the week from 2020 to date, adding 209,000 sales, driven through over a hundred masses of derivatives, adding the FaZe Clan. Offers.
Carter, whose son took him to FaZe Clan after consulting with the company, says music and games “go hand in hand,” he says. “But I don’t necessarily think the game wants music as much as the music wants to play.
“I feel like the market opportunity [in the game] is much greater; enthusiasts are much more sticky,” he continues. “It’s something that people go back to every day. Artists will release albums and succeed between 15 and 20% of their target audience, and that’s with some of the most important superstars on the market.”
This becomes the case of two complementary verticals that seek to locate tactics to inform each other and enrich themselves. The gaming network has a point of commitment and pastime that the music industry greed, as well as a style of monetization, based on free access and in-game food shopping, which continues to grow over time. The music industry has the global dream, resources and superstar creation apparatus that a company like FaZe Clan wants to take to the next point. Players use music in their videos and broadcasts, supporting artists and labels along the way; Artists increasingly show their love of the game in various tactics, breaking stereotypes and helping to elevate the term “player” to the point of “artist” in the esteem of the general public.
“Music is the only entertainment vertical that naturally interacts to the fullest with all other parts of the entertainment mix, and the game feels the same way,” Trink says. “So the script tends to be written once you’ve collaborated.”
This has helped bring the music industry to the table. While the agreements between FaZe Clan and the labels have been unique collaborations (Interscope is a component of Juice WRLD’s sales agreement, for example), conversations are taking place about live events, virtual truth content, movies and documentaries, and other merchandising collaborations. FaZe Clan recently signed two film/television contracts, for example, adding one with film/television manufacturer Michael Sugar’s Sugar23 organization (13 Reasons Why) to create FaZe Studios, a production company designed to make films and exhibits that can rival classic studios. Trink sees the sweet spot as a “joint creation of intellectual assets” or, as he says, “appears in the component, reads about everyone’s strengths and says, “How can we collaborate with them in a way that is difficult for our respective fans?” Bases?”
FaZe Clan isn’t the only video game collective that seeks to bridge the gap between game and culture and bring the music industry into the fold. In October 2018, Drake and Scooter Braun purchased the 100th Thieves esports/lifestyle logo, with the aim of occupying an area similar to the FaZe Clan, for now their footprint is much smaller. Twitch recently announced that Logic, one of the first FaZe Clan fans, has signed an exclusive seven-figure agreement to stream music and game content for a certain number of hours according to the week.
But despite all the excitement surrounding gambling and e-sports, there are some open questions. The game’s style of influence, which lives and dies with the popularity of single players and featured cronies, makes some investors wary. And NewZoo CEO Peter Warman said in 2018 that the profitability of the sector is “a challenge,” the amount of investment that collective gaming subscribers and eSports groups can expect remains uncertain, given the game’s big budgets.
During the pandemic, FaZe Clan led a series of Call of Duty tournaments under the FIGHT2FUND banner, bringing in combination artists such as Luke Combs, ScHoolboy Q, Alesso and Nav with athletes JD Martinez, Ben Simmons and members of the Los Angeles Kings to raise more than $100,000 for organizations like Save the Children and UNICEF in 4 weeks. In May, Atlantic Records signed rapper Rozei, 21, after his song “Ooo La La” appeared in several YouTube videos through Fortnite players. The members of The FaZe Clan produced, directed and made the official music video for the song.
“I often think it’s a transparent destination,” Trink says. “What other entertainment houses can we bring to our vast audience? Where can we go?”
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