Bringing music personalisation to gaming, Stockholm's Reactional Music raises $2 million

Stockholm-based Reactional Music has raised $2.05 million in what they’re calling a Pre-Series A funding round. The new score will be used to further develop the startups’ technologies that enable any song or music to be generated in real-time around a user within a game.

The $2.05 million Pre-Series A round was led by Amanotes and Butterfly Ventures and drew the support of a number of angel investors including Kelly Sumner, a former chairman of Mediatonic (Fall Guys, recently acquired by Epic), CEO of Red Octane (Guitar Hero, acquired by Activision) and CEO of Take 2 Interactive (NASDAQ: TTWO) (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption).

The simplest way to describe what Reactionary Music is working on is to put it in terms of skins and other dress-your-avatar-up accessories available to players in-game. However, instead of visual customisations, Reactionary Music is offering, you guessed it, aural customisations.

One step further perhaps? How many of us have turned down the system volume and turned up that Spotify playlist that has just the right tempo for blasting through that level 27? Personally, I’ve always found a soundtrack by Rush to provide the perfect backing to a number of  ‘X X XO up up left’ sequences. But I digress.

In addition to providing gamers with their own customised soundtrack, the company’s rules-based music engine and delivery platform opens up entirely new avenues for games developers to create and prototype music, and hopefully upping the dismal revenues seen by musicians, a figure that the video games industry places at 0.001 percent of a $200 billion market.

The startup is working on several pilot projects, with The Reactional Engine is being used in a commercially available game for PS5 and PS VR2, with the aiming to go live in 2023. Reactional has also completed multiple music rights agreements with commercial and production music rights holders including Merck Mercuriadis and Nile Rodgers-founded Hipgnosis Song Management.

“This is a key moment in the development of our business. We are fortunate to have both Butterfly and Amanotes leading the round. Each of these organisations brings incredible value to Reactional as we drive the commercial and creative partnership between games, music and creators,” said Reactional Music’s MD, Par Gunnars Risberg.