Riffs in the Code

When id Software was making Doom in 1993, John Romero has said, the team handed composer Bobby Prince CDs of Pantera and Slayer, and Prince wasn’t even a metal fan. He wrote the riffs anyway, and a generation of players still hears a demon-filled corridor in a palm-muted chug.

By 2009 the bands were in the games themselves. Brütal Legend cast Jack Black as roadie Eddie Riggs, Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal and Rob Halford, Lemmy and Lita Ford in speaking parts, and shipped with more than a hundred licensed tracks from 75 bands. Metal: Hellsinger, in 2022, made the music the mechanic: you shoot on the beat, the track builds as you keep time, and Serj Tankian, Matt Heafy, Randy Blythe, Alissa White-Gluz and Mikael Stanne are among the vocalists. It won Best Audio at the Golden Joysticks and was nominated at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards.

Bands Playing the Game

The traffic runs the other way too. Iron Maiden launched a free mobile game, Legacy of the Beast, in July 2016 and later named a tour after it, and Metallica played six songs inside Fortnite in June 2024 to a crowd that paid nothing to get in. On a smaller scale, Blink-182 put out a Pac-Man tie-in in October, game and merch together.

A new game turns up with a logo, a mechanic and no history, and a band walks in with forty or fifty years of it, so the band is the stage set.

The Wheel That Needed No Help

Casino games made the same jump to screens, and most of them had a new game’s problem: nothing of their own that anyone recognised. Roulette was the exception. The wheel is a red and black circle with a ball running round it that you can read from the doorway, and the ritual of spin, pause and call fits on a screen without a riff or a mascot attached. There are two versions of online roulette, and they’re roughly the studio record and the live album: a wheel drawn by software, every spin a clean take, or a real wheel filmed on a studio table with a dealer who talks between spins. Neither lets you influence where the ball lands, which makes roulette the one game where the only skill involved is deciding what you can afford before you sit down. The pace of the game changed when it went online. The furniture didn’t, which is why it moved without a band’s name on the door.

When Slots Hired the Bands

Slots had the opposite problem. Reels aren’t much of a spectacle, so the industry did what Stern did and hired the bands. WMS put a KISS slot machine on the floor at the Las Vegas gaming expo in October 2012, with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons on hand to talk about bringing their classic rock to the casino floor, and Leander Games had released a Megadeth slot a month earlier after signing a licensing deal with the band in 2011. The songs play, the faces spin, and the game underneath is a slot like any other, one that could carry any licence.

Where This Goes

A band’s name has now been sold on a pinball backglass, a game cover, a Fortnite stage and a slot cabinet, and each time the band was what people recognised, which roulette never had to buy. The next interesting crossovers will look more like Hellsinger, where the music is the game and not the wrapping, and whatever follows Hellsinger, my guess is the wheel will still be spinning, unchanged, when it ships.

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Anyone who’s done a festival with a big group knows the accommodation question splits two ways: camp on site, or find somewhere nearby to actually sleep, shower and regroup between sets. For a lot of groups, especially ones mixing ages or travelling any distance, a house near the festival has quietly become the better call than either a soggy tent or a scattering of separate hotel rooms.

The logic is simple once you’ve done it once. Festivals like Download and Bloodstock draw crowds from across the country, and most groups arrive as a mix: some happy to camp, others who’d rather not queue for a shower block at 7am after three days on site. A house nearby solves that without splitting the group. Everyone’s got a proper bed and bathroom to come back to, but you’re still a short drive (or in some cases a walk) from the gates.

Group Escape Houses is a directory of large self-catering houses across the UK, and festival weekends are one of the patterns they see most consistently. Groups book one big house between them rather than a block of hotel rooms or a handful of separate camping pitches, because it keeps everyone together for the parts of the trip that matter most: getting ready before the first band, debriefing the headliner over a late dinner, the lift share back after last orders.

What matters for a festival house

A few things separate a house that works for a festival weekend from one that doesn’t.

Proper drying and storage space. Festival kit is wet, muddy, and takes up more room than people expect. Somewhere to dump wellies, waterproofs and bags that isn’t the hallway makes a real difference by day two.

A kitchen that can feed a crowd fast. Festival days start early and end late, and a house with a big enough kitchen means breakfast doesn’t become a bottleneck before everyone heads off for the day.

Enough bathrooms for a quick turnaround. A group heading out together needs more than one shower running at once, or the first band of the day gets missed.

Distance that actually works. “Nearby” varies a lot, so check real travel time to the site gates, not just distance on a map, especially for festivals with limited shuttle services.

Why it beats the alternatives

Camping on site is cheaper and keeps you in the thick of it, but three or four nights with no proper shower or bed wears a group down, and it’s rarely an option for anyone less keen on sleeping on the ground. Hotel rooms solve the comfort problem but split the group across floors or even separate buildings during the one weekend they’re trying to do together.

A house splits the difference. You get your own bed, a proper bathroom and a kitchen, but the group’s still under one roof, with one place everyone meets before heading to the site and one place everyone ends up after. Splitting the cost of one house between six or eight people often comes close to what the same group would spend on separate hotel rooms anyway, once everyone’s paying for breakfast and there’s nowhere to cook in between.

Booking one directly

The houses on Group Escape Houses are booked direct with the owner, not through a platform, which matters for a festival trip. You can ask up front about parking for a full group’s worth of cars, whether there’s secure space for bikes or kit, and how far the walk to the site is in practice.

If you’re planning a group trip around a festival weekend, it’s worth looking at a house near the site rather than defaulting to tents or a block of hotel rooms. You can see the full range of large group houses across the UK on the Group Escape Houses large group accommodation page.

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The 2027 festival will be a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne. If marketed correctly, it has the potential to reinvigorate interest and turn Ozzfest into an annual event again.

Ozzfest Set to Be Revived in Ozzy Osbourne’s Memory

Ozzfest was founded by Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in 1996 and established itself as a major platform for both established and up-and-coming metal acts. Part of the reason why it ended after 2018 was due to Ozzy’s declining health, but it was also facing competition from other major metal festival brands.

Now that the legendary Prince of Darkness has passed, it makes sense to bring back Ozzfest to honour him. Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s profound influence on metal deserves to be celebrated, and the best way to do this is through his festival. Ozzfest could replicate Back to the Beginning, and feature various tributes from bands that knew and were influenced by Ozzy.

Festival Can Use Online Means to Attract New Audiences

A lot has changed in the world of music and entertainment since the last Ozzfest in 2018. Modern viewers are increasingly discovering content via online platforms like Spotify and social media, and often being guided by algorithmic recommendations. The marketing team could take advantage of this by posting short-form clips of old festivals or promoting some of the bands playing on Spotify.

There’s also the chance that Ozzfest could turn to online promotions to drum up more interest among new audiences. Bonuses and special offers have become more prevalent online in the entertainment market, with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music sometimes offering free trial bonuses. These deals can be seen in the wider entertainment market too. Players can often find a casino bonus such as 200 free spins on online slots such as Big Bass Splash when they spend £10. This is designed to encourage them to try out the casino site.

Ozzfest could tap into this by running promotions such as early bird tickets. If the event follows in the footsteps of Black Sabbath’s farewell concert and is streamed online, there could be deals for online viewers too.

Great News for Emerging Metal Bands

The return of Ozzfest is great news for metal fans, and it could be equally important for emerging acts in the genre. Throughout history, the festival has acted as a platform for bands seeking to reach wider audiences, and there have been some famous success stories.

Slipknot, for example, performed on Ozzfest’s second stage in 1999, just before the release of their debut album. System of a Down also played the second stage in 1998 before moving up to the main stage the following year.

Ozzfest has a strong chance of success in 2027 as it honours the legacy of its late founder. However, to attract younger audiences and ensure that it continues for many years, it may need to turn to online promotion methods.

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Bring Out Your Dead

There is a good argument to be made that The Grateful Dead were the model of this phenomenon. Their setlists varied so much from one night to the next that the catalogue of songs they are documented to have played runs past 500, and fans followed them from city to city because no two shows were the same. Deadheads kept meticulous records, first in printed guides like Deadbase and later online. The Internet Archive’s collection of Grateful Dead shows still holds recordings of nearly every available concert.

Some bands make this an art form, theming each gig around something different. Take Phish. In the summer of 2017, the band played thirteen nights at Madison Square Garden, each themed around a different doughnut flavour, and got through a whopping 237 songs without a single repeat. Rolling Stone’s breakdown of all thirteen nights shows how much ground that covered, and it’s ludicrous in the best possible way.

Making Guessing Part of the Show

When done well, this kind of uncertainty is not a flaw in a live show. After all, fans who know the encore in advance have already heard the concert in a way. It also gives a good reason to buy tickets for a second, third, and subsequent night, because every show is unique.

Sometimes it is this unique:

The same design idea turns up in less expected places. Games of chance have long relied on the fact that you cannot predict the next result, and people understand this is exactly what makes them interesting. Sometimes, it’s part of the structure, not just the outcome: Megaways slots that reshape the reels on every spin are a clear example. This mechanic, developed by Big Time Gaming, changes how many symbols sit on each of six reels from one spin to the next, so the layout itself is different every time. With up to 117,649 ways the symbols can line up, the next configuration is just as unpredictable as a Phish setlist.

Bands that play the same set every night are dependable, and there is nothing wrong with that either from a concertgoer perspective. But there really isn’t anything like having a bit of mystery when showing up for the big night. In an interview with Total Guitar, Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam said “It’s kind of odd to have 130 odd songs and people are clambering and if we play it people will be on the internet [looking for them].” And isn’t that part of the fun? It can be especially sweet for longtime fans, as it always offers a way to relive the first time listening to the band, when everything in the collection was new, and there was always a surprise around every corner.

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One could be forgiven for thinking the title carries political over- or undertones, or that it somehow functions as a comment on the state of the world, but that could not be further from the truth. Rather, it is a strange, intense, and introspective journey into a shadow-world of the lies we continually tell ourselves in order to cope, where unexpected horrors and destructive illusions manifest themselves in the most subtle yet twisted ways, often with a terrible outcome.

In the words of J.N., “A Plea for Decency is very much a portrait of grief and despondency, and each track revolves around an obsession with the mystery of how chance and circumstance impact our lives, more often than not in ways that are outright soul-destroying. On another level, the record is also a musical treatise on (and a homage to) the redemptive power of art and how it is capable of transforming us. Without music, how else are we to make sense of an unthinkable world?”

The avenues we explore consistently leave us feeling empty, and the name of this particular excursion into ambient darkness is essentially a plea for a last-minute reprieve from that.

A Plea for Decency was released digitally by Gymnocal Industries on 7 August 2026.

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The 2027 ACM Awards have been confirmed for May 16, 2027, with the grand event returning to the MGM Grand Garden Arena. It has also been announced that the awards will be streamed on Prime Video.

The ACM Awards have been held annually since their inception in 1966. Although there is no fixed venue for the ceremony, most of the events this century have been held in Las Vegas.

ACM Awards 2027

While the organisers haven’t yet announced the host, they have confirmed that next year’s event will return to the MGM Grand Garden Arena. The 17,000-seat venue is located within the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

The arena opened in 1993 and is recognised for its beneficial sightlines provided within the bowl design, as well as its state-of-the-art amenities.

Recently, it hosted rapper ASAP Rocky and stars including Charli XCX and The Smashing Pumpkins are set to feature in the coming months.

The awards have been televised since 1972, with Amazon’s Prime Video taking over the reins from CBS in 2022.

In May 2025, it was announced Prime Video had paid for the rights to show the awards for another three years, which means it will be a regular fixture until at least 2028.

A Las Vegas Boost

Reports suggest the 2026 event generated more than $50m for the local area, bringing a much-needed economic boost to the area.

Las Vegas has seen visitor numbers dwindle in recent years. Previously, casino tourism was the main driver of visitors to the city. However, players now have more access to casino live games online, complete with bonuses and sizeable jackpots, which has been thought to impact the casinos in Vegas.

As well as the convenience of online gaming, Sin City’s slight downturn in visitor numbers has also been attributed to pricing policies by hotels and casinos.

Despite reduced visitor numbers, Vegas has managed to sustain revenue and profit figures, especially thanks to economic diversification.

Las Vegas’s Musical Heritage

Vegas has long been a popular destination for musicians. Superstars like Elvis Presley, Celine Dion, U2, and Elton John have brought hundreds of millions of dollars to venues with some of the biggest Vegas residencies.

Another star that has enjoyed successful residencies is country music star Shania Twain. Her most recent residency, Come On Over, ran for 9 months at Planet Hollywood’s Bakkt Theatre. Twain has previously had two other runs in Vegas.

Her popularity saw the ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’ singer given the honour of hosting this year’s ACM Awards, her first time in the hot seat. Next year’s presenter has not yet been named, but Twain could host again.

First time hosting the @ACMAwards!! Now what will I wear? looking forward to a night of Country Music and celebrating musical talent in my favourite city! https://t.co/tdieUvE3vA

— Shania Twain (@ShaniaTwain) April 22, 2026

Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan have both hosted five ceremonies, while Reba McEntire has hosted an incredible 18 awards. Other globally recognised names to have hosted the event include Carrie Underwood, Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton, and Keith Urban, showing the range of iconic stars to host the event over the years.

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The Oklahoma group arrived in Manchester fresh from their Saturday slot at Download Festival in Leicestershire, with a sold-out London O2 Forum Kentish Town date to follow two nights later. The UK leg marked The All-American Rejects‘ return to touring the country for the first time in over ten years.

The shows landed in the wake of Sandbox, released on 15 May 2026. It is the band’s fifth studio album, their first as an independent act and their first full-length record in 14 years, following 2012’s Kids in the Street. Produced by frontman Tyson Ritter, lead guitarist Nick Wheeler and Scott Chesak, Sandbox spans themes of reconciling youth, standing on your own two feet as an adult and facing the outside world. Speaking about the record, Ritter said it had “helped me survive in this modern age”, grounded in the band’s identity as a self-described “blue-collar rock band” that never quite fit a scene but persevered anyway.

The Manchester set drew right across the band’s catalogue alongside material from Sandbox, opening with ‘Swing, Swing’ and closing the encore on ‘Gives You Hell’, by way of staples including ‘Dirty Little Secret’, ‘Move Along’ and ‘It Ends Tonight’. The night also featured three songs the band would drop from the following London show: ‘King Kong’, ‘Fast and Slow’ and ‘I’m Waiting’.

Photos by Kelsey Thomson.

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Visual impact in rock and metal content

RAMzine readers know that rock and metal are not only heard through records. They are experienced through stage production, videos, tour announcements, festival clips, interviews and the constant stream of visual material that surrounds a release. A band may have the riffs and the attitude, but the edit still needs to land. A title card, lighting hit, crowd shot or breakdown cut can feel flat when the sound design does not support the energy already present in the music.

A focused set of boom sounds gives creators deep hits, cinematic low tones, heavy transitions and clean force designed for trailers, films, games and ads. These sounds help a visual moment feel bigger while keeping the edit controlled. The point is not to make every frame louder. It is to choose the exact moment where a reveal, logo, cut or scene change needs extra weight beneath the music.

Matching sound design to heavy music

Metal and rock mixes are already dense. Guitars, drums, bass, vocals and crowd noise can fill a wide frequency range before any extra sound design enters the edit. That means a boom has to be chosen with care. A loose low-end hit can blur the kick drum, while a tight boom can underline a cut without fighting the track. The best choice depends on the song, the scene and the amount of space left in the mix.

A live video may need a deep accent when lights hit the stage, while a music video might need a shorter boom under a sudden camera move or scene change. A documentary clip could use a more restrained low tone to support a serious interview section. Each use has a different function. Treating the boom as part of the arrangement helps the edit feel connected to the band’s sound rather than placed on top afterward.

Movement, transitions and screen energy

Heavy content often relies on movement. Camera pushes, whip cuts, fast graphics, smoke bursts and crowd shots all need to feel deliberate. A boom can supply weight, but motion sometimes needs a different shape. This is where whoosh effects can support movement between shots, giving titles, transitions and fast edits a cleaner sense of direction. Used with restraint, they help the viewer follow the cut without stealing focus from the track.

Editors should separate force and motion when building a sequence. A boom gives the moment mass, while a whoosh can carry the movement into or out of it. Combining both can work for a major reveal, such as a tour poster, album announcement or final trailer beat, but smaller cuts usually need one clear sound choice. Too many layers make the edit feel busy, especially when the music is already driving hard.

Practical choices for bands and video teams

Good sound design starts with the purpose of the clip. A thirty second single teaser needs quick recognition and strong timing, while a long form behind the scenes piece needs more subtle support. A festival recap may lean into bigger hits because the visuals are built around crowds, lights and scale. A stripped acoustic session needs a lighter touch, because a huge boom would break the mood and make the production feel forced.

Teams working quickly should build a small palette before the edit begins. Choose one or two deep booms for major moments, a few shorter hits for quick cuts, and a limited set of transitions for movement. This keeps the video consistent and avoids the common problem of every section sounding unrelated. A band’s visual identity becomes stronger when the same type of sonic detail carries across trailers, shorts, reels and release campaigns.

Low end without losing the song

Boom design only works when the music remains in control. A good editor checks each accent against the kick, bass and main riff before committing it to the cut. If the boom hides the song’s attack, it needs trimming, filtering or replacing. If it disappears on phone speakers, it may need a little upper texture to stay readable. The aim is to make the visual feel heavier without making the track feel smaller.

Playback context matters because rock and metal content travels across many platforms. A video might be watched on headphones, laptop speakers, a phone or a venue screen before a set change. A useful boom has enough shape to survive those spaces. Deep sub energy can add size on larger systems, but the mid range detail often tells the listener that a hit has happened. That balance keeps the edit effective across real listening conditions.

A heavier finish with control

Strong music content does not need constant extra sound. It needs the right sound at the right edit point. A boom under an album title can make the announcement feel serious. A low hit beneath a breakdown cut can make the visual feel connected to the song. A deep accent at the end of a tour trailer can leave the viewer with a sense of weight. These choices work because they serve the moment rather than covering it.

Ocular Sounds fits this workflow as a practical source of premium, original sound effects and music for creators who need cinematic depth, fast editing options and simple royalty free use. Its boom collection is built for deep hits, heavy transitions, trailer moments and bold commercial edits, giving bands, labels and video teams material that can support heavy visuals without drowning the mix. Used carefully, those sounds make the image hit with the same confidence as the music.

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Now it’s completely different, with attendees and organisers uploading clips and livestreams online. This could be paving the way for major festivals to become hybrid events, where the action in the fields is made available on online entertainment platforms.

Festivals May Need to Adapt to the Age of Digital Platforms

Even with all the changes in the way we experience entertainment, festivals have endured and stayed popular. There are questions around how long that can continue in the traditional format, though, as the pull of digital entertainment platforms grows stronger.

For nearly every form of online entertainment, people are used to interacting with sprawling platforms. In music, for instance, everything is now on Spotify or Apple Music, with people easily able to switch between different artists or albums in seconds. The same thing is true for film and television, with streaming services providing thousands of options. Even the online bingo industry has its own platforms, with everything from bingo rooms to bingo slots online. There are even live bingo options powered by live streaming, something that may also be adopted by festivals, as we will discuss.

With festivals only happening as annual one-offs, it may not make sense for each one to build its own platform where viewers can watch every act. But there could be a gap in the market for a specialised festival platform pulling together content from a wide range of events around the world, arranged like a streaming service, with users clicking through thumbnails to drop into different stages.

Live Streaming Is Already Becoming a Key Feature of Festivals

A few things make this plausible, and the rise of high-quality live streaming helps most of all. Many major festivals already stream performances in real time on platforms like YouTube. Coachella is a strong example, with its 2026 coverage streaming across seven stages.

The appeal is obvious: it expands a festival’s reach and turns it into a global online event. Plenty of people watching from home would never be able to travel to California, afford a ticket, or take the time off work. By opening up access online, Coachella becomes something closer to an event for everyone.

It would make sense for other festivals to follow suit, because it makes them far more inclusive. There’s no denying tickets for the biggest events have become a lot more expensive than they once were, so an online platform carrying live streams could act as a cheaper alternative.

With online platforms now the main way we connect with every other form of entertainment, hybrid festivals built around subscription access could be the logical next step, a single place to experience them all. The technology is here, and it would open these events up to a much larger audience.

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Some artists have already experimented with interactive experiences, but there are other lessons they could learn from the entertainment industry to gamify their marketing techniques.

Engagement Techniques Necessary in the Attention Economy

In today’s attention economy, entertainment sites have mastered the art of engaging people and encouraging them to try new experiences. Musicians can borrow ideas for their album marketing.

For viewers who want to find random content on Netflix, the streaming platform has a Play Something feature. Music artists could experiment with this gamified approach to album releases and release their singles to different listeners in a non-specific order.

This could change the way listeners discover music and make album releases more interactive. Certain singles may be released to some fans and not others, building anticipation for upcoming single drops.

Experiments with Interactive Experiences

Some artists have already seen the need to adapt to the new paradigm of online engagement and have explored ways to integrate more fully with the digital world. For example, there have been various metaverse-based concerts, where artists appear in digital form to millions of viewers worldwide. It’s a concept being embraced by huge, well-known acts, as well as more niche performers.

One example is the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. The group has performed in virtual environments, where participants can engage with sound and visuals in real time. Instead of passively listening, participants essentially become part of the experience itself. It’s a highly innovative way of letting people enjoy music and one that can inspire other acts to try similar things.

The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse includes various members around the world, with the late Pauline Oliveros being one of the most important figures in its history. Her vision still lives on in the way the group continues to experiment with new concepts.

This increased interaction and immersion has been seen across other industries. For example, iGaming platforms have embraced more interactive game formats like live casino online, with casinos now offering multiple variations, including Mega Fire Blaze Roulette Live. These include a live-streamed game with a real dealer, who players are able to interact with online, showing how all industries are adapting to make experiences more immersive.

The days of music artists simply promoting their work through touring and playing in front of as many fans as possible could be coming to an end. Or, at least, there may be less emphasis on this form of marketing. Now, it’s becoming clearer that listeners want interactive experiences that involve them as much as possible. Gamification of album releases could soon become commonplace, as this could make them more memorable.

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