K/DA, True Damage, and why Riot won’t Release an Album
Another Worlds is gone, and we are left with the slow season of League of Legends. While the grand finals themselves were underwhelming, the opening ceremony was a sight to behold. All 3 songs that Riot released this year were on display with the holograms that are now a staple of the opening ceremony. Most interesting however was the emergence of True Damage, the second year in a row in which Riot has put together a musical collab for the Worlds Opening ceremony.
So today, lets talk about True Damage and their counterpart from last year K/DA. Lets look into where these groups have landed with the community as well as answering one of the most common community sentiments, why can’t these groups release more than one song?
True Damage and K/DA in the realm of music
Before we go into the future of Riot based music, a few disclaimers here. I have scoured Spotify and Youtube in an attempt to get as much listening data as I could. I am going to have hard numbers here, but I am only going to make generalizations with them. At the end of the day, I don’t have a lot of data and I am working off Spotify here. It would be intellectually irresponsible to claim my data infalible on this one. K-pop stans, if you know of a better way to get this data, I encourage you to spam my Twitter with it. Additionally, I have absolutely 0 idea how much Riot paid the members of K/DA, or what kind of income they are getting off the music. I also can’t manage to find figures on skin sales for this line, so we are running off a lot of guess work here. This all being said, this is a discussion more on theory, so a lack of exact numbers is detrimental to this discussion, just a nuisance.
Let’s start with K/DA, the first major Riot Games collab group (Pentakill will get their time in this piece, don’t worry). Upon release, Pop-Stars was a huge success, this is completely undeniable. The video for the song had over 10 million views in the first 2 days. While not unheard of in the music industry (BTS has 74,6 Mil), it is still a great feat, particularly for a group that was for such a specific purpose. Additionally, the group was #1 on the digital sales charts upon release, another huge milestone. To this day K/DA still has 1.3 million monthly listeners, and is still the most listened to song my (G)I-dle. To put that in perspective, (G)I-dle has just over double of that while also having put out new music recently and having a repertoire of more than one song. In short, K/DA as a single worked wonders.
Now, True Damage is by no means slouching when it comes to viewership. 6 days after release we are already at 18 million views on Youtube, almost 8 million listens on spotify. While the hype is not quite at the same levels as K/DA, this is by all means, a success for Riot’s music department once again. Lets take a look at the stats for the people that they did bring in though. Becky G alone has higher listening metrics than every single other member or True Damage and K/DA…..combined. The other 3 unique members to this group (Duckwrth, Thutmose, and Keke Palmer) are no slouches either, each averaging over a million monthly listeners. This puts Riot in a weird position because, you have more than likely increased the cost of this groups. We are going to ignore Soyeon for the purpose of this thought experiment assuming that Riot payed her the same rate for both performances. Even if Riot payed all the performers the same amount relative to their counterparts a year before (generous assumption due to Becky G, but lets work with it), they are still paying for an entire additional person to be a part of this group. This includes whatever cost was associated with doing the collab, as well as travel for them to preform live. This additional capital, was met with good reception, but not KD/A levels of reception. This, is what brings me to the crux of this article.
Why has Riot only ever done one off songs with these groups?
The answer is simple, risk. True Damage was a success still. The song is great, the reception is great, and the viewership is great. It just, wasn’t K/DA though. It serves as proof that, every single Riot release is not going to defy expectations. To invest the extra capital into creating a full album for any of these groups would be borderline insane, forgetting the part where it needs to be lucrative enough for artists to leave their current projects long enough to do it. While, I am confident a KD/A album would pop off, would it really be worth the investment. The skins sales are already done, the performance has already drawn in its viewership and sponsors. An album would certainly bring in more viewers and listeners, but….would it actually make a difference. There are diminishing returns after the first single, as it is, even sharper than normally in the music industry due to the reliance on skin sales.
Riot tried this, create a band out of their in game character already with Pentakill, and it has been good. The songs are liked and still get listens today. It isn’t exactly driving the Riot revenue train right now though. Pentakill skins are not selling like hot cakes anymore. By creating a new group every year, Riot can explore something new, while also knowing that, whatever skins are made and whatever song they release will see a strong release window that will be profitable. There is little to no incentive to take the risk and invest a full album off of any of these groups. It disappoints me as much as any fan of these songs, but it would be foolish to pretend that Riot should be making albums with their artists.
Riot makes most of their money through the hype and release of these songs. Each new group brings in a new set of skins to sell, and a majority of which will be sold in a short time of the new single being released. Each new group also comes with a wealth of earned media from the hype generated for the new group, as well as media outlets reporting on it. These one off songs are amazing for Riot Games, and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for them to try and reuse a group, when there could be an entire new group for the next season?
So, where does this leave us? Well, every year, we the fans get another great song and performance on the Worlds stage. In addition, new groups mean new genres and ideas to explore, and new skins for us to enjoy in game. While, I too would like more K/DA or True Damage songs to listen to, I as a consumer am more than happy to take my yearly dose of high quality Riot Games music content.
