It's been a wild ride, and it wouldn't have been made possible without Paulina Bozek, who has been the driving force behind SingStar's success since day one. So how does she feel about SingStar now that it's a proven success, and what's in store for the future of the worlds favourite singing franchise? With Party Hits being released later this week and SingStar: Volume 2 on the PlayStation 3 just around the corner, we had a chance to sit down with the lovely Ms. Bozek during our visit to Sony's London Studio earlier this month, and as self-confessed rabid SingStar fans, we had a lot of questions.
The new Harmony mode in Volume 2 in action.
PALGN: In terms of the SingStore, since it came out a lot of people might say it hasn’t lived up to their expectations. Is that disappointing for you when you see people complaining about it?
Paulina Bozek: It is difficult! It’s interesting, because on the one hand we’re definitely seeing some feedback from people saying it isn’t everything they hoped and dreamed it would be, but on the other hand, we’re seeing a million songs downloaded and 20,000 videos uploaded and lots of people smiling and singing and having a great time. We listen to the feedback very closely – we read the forums religiously and we look at all the articles being written and we take it all in big time. But I think it’s important to not get completely sidetracked and to still understand that there are lots of users that are having a great time.
We made a decision to launch on December 7th, and the store was not at the 300 odd songs that we’d originally talked about, but we felt that the best decision and the way that we could get to a big number quickly was to release and build that store as fast as possible. By releasing when we did, we got a lot of momentum from the people we work with and the music industry to really make it happen, and as of today we’re at 419 songs across different languages (225 in English) and updates are around 50 songs every two weeks which will settle down to 50 per month because it’s really quite a lot compared to some of the other music games that are out.
All feedback is listened to – there’s a few things as well that are interesting. We see a lot of people say ‘oh, songs that have been on SingStar before’ or ‘recycled songs’, but we look at SingStar overall… we’ve licensed over 1300 songs and some of those have been the best 80's and 90's tracks or contemporary hits, so it wouldn’t make sense to leave them out because they’ve been on the PS2; like A-Ha or Queen for example that people still want. We’ve found that people on average only own 2 PS2 SingStar discs, so there are a lot of songs for people that are still ‘new’. But we are always listening and trying to improve as fast as we can.
PALGN: There’s always been the ‘issue’ with the SingStar franchise that it only recognizes pitch and not the actual pronunciation of specific lyrics, meaning that you can essentially hum your way through entire songs and get a high score. Is refining the game to that other level something you’re looking into?
PB: We have been looking at basic speech recognition – the rap system works in that area. Speech recognition is extremely complex and most times when dealing with that speech recognition system you’ve got a really limited vocabulary, like in SOCOM or other games where you may have 60 or 100 commands, but in SingStar you’ve got all the words said during 30 songs – it’s very difficult to do robustly.
If we were to track speech AND pitch at the same time it would also make the game a lot harder, so it’s definitely something we’re going to continue to look at, but it’s not as easy to do and we want to keep it simple and easy. Rap is a different style where you need more emphasis, but we probably won’t be adding it to the standard singing gameplay.
The rap meter is probably the most speech recognition you're going to get!
PALGN: Is there potential for any 'video game' songs on SingStar? We've seen the Portal song on Rock Band, as an example.
PB: *Laughs*. We've got some songs that we play around with, like the Katamari Damacy stuff. We've got all kinds of things that we get up to here! I think it's a good idea, and it's kind of about... why not? I've had conversations with the LocoRoco guys and stuff like that, so ideas like that for downloadable content are really cool - we're not just limited to discs any more!
PALGN: With the SingStore, the option for 'Song Packs' has been there since the start. Is this something you'll be introducing soon? Will the packs be based on genres or will they be focused on specific artists?
PB: With song packs, we don't really have everything worked out at the moment. We are definitely working on it though, that's why the option is there! Our ideal would be to offer different sized packs of 5 or 10 songs, and compilations and varieties that make sense, like a 'Best of David Bowie' track pack or something around specific themes. But at this moment we don't have much we can reveal on the song packs.
PALGN: We keep hearing about the 'wishlist' for SingStar, all the tracks that you would like to have in the game. How big is this wishlist? How massive are we talking?
PB: Oh, thousands and thousands of songs, easily.
PALGN: How do you go about selecting which ones you're going to try to get on SingStar next? Is there a system of some kind?
PB: We try to prioritize - we have people on the marketing team who know their music quite well, but we have a good idea of what's popular. We also test every single song on the wishlist to make sure it's going to work on SingStar, because there are some great songs that don't actually have any singing in it or songs that are monotone the whole way through, so we try to prioritize songs that make the best experience.
A classic we always talk about, three years ago one of our marketing people suggested 'Around the World' by Daft Punk; a great song, but it's just the same lyric over and over again 300 times! *Laughs*. But it's always a balancing act, because then again some songs where the melody isn't perfect, but people still love it, like, it's the song of their youth and they grew up with it. But we do have a huge database of songs and a whole team that create the songs - and they're all musicians as well. They create the melody file and they start by listening to every single song on that list.
Variety is always the key.
PALGN: How much input from the SingStar 'fans' is there in terms of making tracks available?
PB: The newest disc on PS2 actually which we're working on is Boybands vs. Girlbands. That was completely voted on by the community, and they know what they want so we had a vote like 'what disc do you want next?' - the other options were 80's vs 90's and Cheesy Songs/One Hit Wonders. So Boybands vs. Girlbands won, and we're currently putting a tracklist together for that. We're really enthusiastic about it, and it's interesting because we're still releasing on the PS2, PS3 and of course the SingStore at the same time, so we're very busy!
PALGN: What does the future hold for SingStar?
PB: Plans for SingStar are definitely long-term. Believe it or not, there are people who still haven't played SingStar yet! We see SingStar and My SingStar Online as only just the beginning. There's loads of scope to enhance the experience further. You'll definitely be hearing more from us later this year.
PALGN would like to thank Paulina Bozek very much for taking the time to talk to us.
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