Arcane Season 2 finally has a release month, and fans are already speculating about the upcoming show. Now, showrunner Christian 'Praeco' Linke has also given a few insights into the music behind the first season, as well as some hints toward the second.
Arcane had some of the best original music out of any show in a long time. Each musical scene was constructed with love and care, the music fitting perfectly into the mood of that specific episode and scene, woven into the creation naturally.
On Reddit, Christian 'Praeco' Linke gave a few insights into the music behind the first season, and also hinted at difficulties that could occur in season 2 of Arcane.
Arcane Season 2: Riot Have Easier Time Finding Collabs
Riot Praeco revealed that for season 1 of Arcane, it was difficult for the show runners to find artists who were willing to collab with them for music in specific episodes. He explained the process of adding original songs into each episode, stating that usually during story-boarding the team would write the songs and then try to find the right artist to sing them.
Approaching artists though was difficult, since Arcane had not proven itself to be a success, so artists and their record labels were apprehensive to join the team.
Pulling off the Season 1 soundtrack was really hard, because nobody really took us seriously. We were an unproven story team developing a project with an unproven small boutique animation studio.
He even revealed that Imagine Dragons, who had performed the 2014 League of Legends World Championship anthem, Warriors, really believed in Arcane and wanted to be a part of it. They had to fight tooth and nails against the higher up at Interscope/Universal to be a part of Arcane.
Riot Praeco on how they hired the song writers for Arcane.Notes that Imagine Dragons had to fight a lot with their label in order to do work for Arcane and they have a very big artist working on a really dope song for season 2. pic.twitter.com/2bgxU0QmtO
— Spideraxe (@Spideraxe30) November 28, 2023
Well, fast-forward and Arcane was a huge success, the soundtrack also insanely popular, which has made it much easier for the Arcane team to approach artists, since this is a project that has a proven track record, but it seems that even if Arcane is an insanely popular show, there are still some issues with some labels letting their artists perform on the soundtrack.
Right now, there's a song that everyone on the team absolutely loves for a particular scene in our second season. The (very big) artist wrote it specifically for the moment. But because we cannot promise a marketing campaign to make it a "single release" that stands out way above the rest of the soundtrack's songs, the record label will likely not allow us to use the song.
So, it seems that while the song is perfect and the artist even wrote it for the show, their record label might get in the way of adding it into the series. This would be truly devastating since it seems like it was written with Arcane in mind and just having the song released later as a single would take some of the magic away.
One thing is for sure though, the music that will be featured in Season 2 is going to be just as good as in season 1. The songs and artists are chosen with such care that it'll be a great combination, we just know it. Now if only it was already November 2024....