Hoping to create promotional synergies between its games and music artists, Electronic Arts announced the formation of EA Trax, a partnership program that will put more mainstream songs into EA games.
EA Trax is designed facilitate the use of songs in games and cross-promote upcoming and established musicians via cooperative advertising, events and co-branded retail marketing. The first game to bear fruit from the EA Trax program is Madden NFL 2003, and other sports titles will follow, including NBA Live 2003, NHL 2003, FIFA 2003 and NASCAR Thunder 2003. Madden NFL 2003 will feature singles from Bon Jovi, Andrew WK, Nappy Rootsm Good Charlotte, and others. Several of songs in Madden 2003 will be heard in the game before their respective albums are released. EA Trax has lined up Electra, Capitol, Atlantic, Interscope, Dreamworks, MCA, Lava, and Island/Def Jam as its initial partner labels. "Music labels now see games as an important channel for promotion and distribution," said Steve Schnur, Worldwide Executive of Music for EA. "We've introduced an enhanced audio experience into our EA titles, allowing our games to become a major promotion and distribution channel for introducing new artists and debuting new music from established acts." "We realized that the time people spend playing our games is enormous and the number of impressions a new song can make is in the hundreds of millions," said Jeff Karp, VP of Marketing for Electronic Arts.
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