Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.

On this 'cast Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide, is joined by Maria Egan, the Global Head of Music – as well as events – at Riot Games.

Riot is home to a number of extremely popular online games, including League of Legends and Valorant. But it’s also a TV and movie producer: Riot made the award-winning Netflix animated series, Arcane.

Today, Riot Games is owned by Chinese giant Tencent, which paid $400 million to buy a 93% stake in the company in 2011.

Maria Egan joined Riot last year from music-making platform Splice, where she was Chief Music Officer. Prior to that, Egan was a highly successful President and Head of Creative at PULSE Music Group.
 
Egan's career so far has seen her work closely with talent including Kehlani, Tiesto, Run The Jewels, and more.

She is also an alumnus of Columbia Records, where she was once Vice President of A&R.

In addition to its work in games, TV, and film, Riot Games is taking music very seriously: It has previously worked with Imagine Dragons on the hit single from the Arcane soundtrack, Enemy, which has over 2 billion streams to date. 

Each year, for the League of Legends World Championship, a different track is chosen as the official anthem of the tournament. In previous years, this honor has fallen to the likes of Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X. 

For this year’s tournament, the anthem comes from fast-rising Korean act New Jeans, who are signed to HYBE, with a track called GODS.