Original Amiga Works and Early Game Soundtracks

Hi all,

Over the past few weeks I have been working on gathering, collating, cleaning up and sorting my old Amiga music from 1988-1995 approx. It has resulted in two album releases:

• Dr. Awesome: Original Amiga Works
• Dr. Awesome: Early Game Soundtracks

The "Original Amiga Works" album contains 105 different tracks that I composed using only an Amiga computer and various "tracker" software like Soundtracker, Noisetracker, Protracker, OctaMED and JamCracker back in about 1988-1993. The sound is untouched, exactly as output from the Amiga. I considered maybe fixing up the sound a bit, maybe make the left/right channels less extreme panned, applying some mastering, EQ etc. But after thinking about it, I decided in the end to keep them exactly as they were originally. I wanted the listening experience to be exactly as we remember it. This is a digital-only album, so no actual physical CD's are made, but it's divided into 5 "CD's" anyway, so it's a 5-CD album containing 100 tracks. It's really 105 tracks, but the maximum allowed number of tracks on one album was 100, so I had to join some tracks together into one sound file, in order to get the 105 tracks reduced to 100. The album, or its individual tracks, can be purchased and downloaded from CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or other similar digital music services, or it can be streamed at Spotify, XBox Music, Google Play Music, Wimp and other streaming services. I hope you enjoy. Click here for a full track listing.

The "Early Game Soundtracks" album contains 3 virtual CD's and a total of 81 tracks. It contains some of the original video game soundtracks that I made for Amiga games and some early PC games, back in about 1988-1995. Some of this music (I guess most of it) was also made using only the Amiga and the 4 channels of digital sound, although some additional tracks were made with MIDI and synth sounds. Games include Qwak, Spinjam, Brat, Siege of Avalon, Bomberman, Cubulus, Shanghai and many more.
This album, or its individual tracks, is also available for purchase and download from CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or other similar digital music services, or it can be streamed at Spotify, XBox Music, Google Play Music, Wimp and other streaming services. Click here for a full track listing.

It was fun to gather, clean up and release these old tracks and I guess they kind of serve as a "document" to the music I made using the Amiga computer back in the good old late 80's and early 90's.

I did also create several dozens more tracks on the Amiga, which are not represented on either of these two albums. But I had to be a bit careful when selecting the tracks to release, because in my old Amiga music days I made quite a lot of cover tracks, like "Mama" by Genesis, "New World Man" by Rush and many, many others. I tried my best to get those tracks to sound as good as I could using only 4 channels of 8-bit audio. Quite the challenge! But fun. :-) Obviously, for reasons of copyright, I could not include those cover versions / sound-alikes on these two albums for commercial release.

Bjorn Lynne music appearing in thousands of productions - what's up with that?

Today I received an email from Assad, who had come across my music in a game called SolarMax (I've never even heard of this game before, but that's not unusual) and he had done a little bit of research and found that the same music tracks were up for sale / licensing via the royalty-free music website Shockwave-Sound.com for only $30. So he was wondering - is this really the case? Can people really take my music and put it in their game... and pay only $30??

I wrote him an answer and I thought I'd share it here, since I'm often asked about this.

Hi Assad,

It's true, it is possible to legally license my music, for use in games and other commercial products, for prices starting from only $30. I have made my living on this for many years now. For the last 12 years I have made myself a good income with this business model. Actually, prices start from $30 but if you want to use the music for “bigger” projects, you have to buy the Mass Market License, which costs 2.5 x the amount of the Standard License. So if you see $30, that means the Standard License costs $30 and the Mass Market License costs $30 x 2.5 = $75.

SolarMax - Just one of thousands of
games and apps with Bjorn Lynne music

I own and manage Shockwave-Sound.com and we are working with about 300 composers who have their music sold via this site. We sell many, many licenses each day. After 12 years of having my music licensed like this, I have got my music used in maybe over 50,000 different projects (films, games, commercials, web sites, YouTube videos, installation, trade show / corporate videos, etc. etc.). Most of them, I don’t even know about. Sometimes I surprisingly come across my own music in some video game, iPhone / Android App, etc.

It may sound like $30 is a very small price to license music, but remember, it’s the same music that gets licensed by several hundred other customers, so this customer is not getting unique music. He/she only gets to use the music that potentially hundreds of other people are also using in their projects. I’m making a lot of money on this and I’ve made great success. So… I’m pretty happy with that!

Plus, it's kind of cool to come across my own music here and there, whether I'm watching a film like Respire (where I surprisingly heard some of my music in the background to one of the scenes in the movie) or playing a game like Vertigo on the Wii, where I also surprisingly recognized my own music.

All the best,
Bjorn Lynne

Worms, Worms and more Worms

From time to time I'm asked about music that I composed for the many different "Worms" games from 1995 until 2006 when I worked as a composer of video games for Team17 Software.

To keep this music from "dying out" I've now made a lot of it - maybe not all of it, but everything that I still had on backups and that I could make sense of, arrange and present in nice and tidy way, and that sounded ok as music in its own right, outside the scope of the game.

I invested a huge amount of creative effort in all that Worms music through the years, so it's with pleasure that I'm able to present it on my website now, so that the music can "live on" and be heard by fans of the games, and the music itself.

The music is available in FLAC (lossless audio) or MP3 (256-kbps) from the Bjorn Lynne Download Shop.