Something I’ve observed is the rather narrow range of bands as far as their time period goes. Most seem to be from the 70s and 80s (which, as mentioned, are in turn predominantly the “angry rock” type) with very few from after that.
I get that licensing for newer artists are prohibitively expensive and are a big risk because no one’s tried it before, but perhaps it’s because I’m thinking in terms of on-location play, as in places like shopping malls, pizza restaurants, laundromats, nightclubs, etc., where there is a lot of foot traffic of people from younger demographics. (Admittedly, I would be part of said demographic–I had to groan a bit inside when I saw friggin’ Led Zeppelin be the most recent Stern release. There has been no pinball release of a band that isn’t from before my time.) But even just once, I’d like to see someone TRY for something like Imagine Dragons, BTS, Lizzo, Twenty-One Pilots, Taylor Swift, Khalid, Alicia Keys, Bump of Chicken, or any other musician or musical group that has actually charted recently. If it doesn’t work out, it doens’t work out, but the lack of any 2010s/2020s-era musical themes suggests to me a sort of risk aversion.
(That being said, I don’t think the fanbase for Twenty-One Pilots in particular would take well to there being a pinball machine of the band. They have a reputation for falling thoroughly into the mindset of “It’s Popular, Now It Sucks!,” and a pinball machine is enough to push them over the edge.)
One thing that could be done regarding that is to go for less well-known acts and build a soundtrack based on that. This is what many indie video games have been doing recently, such as Castle Crashers and Lethal League Blaze, both of which were done on the budget of a few people working with each other remotely from their bedrooms and garages.
That being said, this can’t be done to draw in people to play, but rather, it would be done in lieu of having an in-house composer. It CAN, however, create a vehicle for some people to take off from.
Just wanted to point out that while the boat has passed, Bronies were willing to sink HUGE amounts of money into merchandise that spoke to them, regardless of what it was. This was a fandom that kept its ears very close to the ground for any new projects themed on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and regularly had people sinking thousands of dollars into fanmade things much smaller and less interactive than pinball machines (such as figures and plush toys).
The final episode had aired October 2019 though, and with that, as they themselves say, “the spark has been lost.” But throughout the 2010s, I felt like this was a very good theme to pick to get into an otherwise untapped market. I don’t think we’ll see something like this again, though it did get pretty close with Steven Universe, with fan-run conventions where fanmade merchandise would run considerable price tags, albeit with smaller numbers of people (but this, too, is waning as the TV show has ended).
A tabletop game had just been released based on Friendship Is Magic though, so it’s not completely dead yet. There may also be a kind of cultural nostalgia lingering for decades to come. That being said, Friendship Is Magic is kind of a demographic/psychographic dead end, since there was a lot of monomania within that fandom. That is, fans of the show tended not to be fans of anything else, so it’s difficult to impossible to actually keep their attention for long if you weren’t directly involved with the show or the fandom.
(NOTE: I may have some bias regarding this issue, which might be evident based on my username. I had also considered making a Friendship Is Magic pinball machine as a fan-project myself, though it never got off the ground.)
