In 2009, in between full-time shifts at a local factory, then-19-year-old musician Daniel Rosenfeld composed a score for an independent video game. “It was just a side hustle, maybe not even that. It was a hobby, really,” explains Rosenfeld, who records under the name C418.
The game, Minecraft, turned out to be successful beyond Rosenfeld’s wildest dreams. In 2014, Microsoft purchased Minecraft’s Swedish developer, Mojang Studios, for $2.5 billion, and through 2023, it had sold 300 million copies of the game, making it the best-selling video game of all time. Now, it’s the latest one to receive a movie adaption, and even that has been wildly successful: A Minecraft Movie, starring Jack Black, is the biggest box office hit of 2025 to date, having already grossed $550.6 million since it opened on April 4.
Because no one anticipated the game’s whirlwind success, or had the budget to properly pay him back in 2009, Rosenfeld was compensated for his work with a small fee and 100% ownership over Minecraft’s now-iconic score. Then, when Microsoft came calling, Rosenfeld made a fateful decision: he refused to sell the score to the tech behemoth, opting instead to bring on game composer manager Patrick McDermott to help him navigate building a business as an independent composer of Minecraft.
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McDermott counts himself as one of the rare folks who understands how to navigate both games and music. He started his career at Captured Tracks, and from 2015 to 2020 he built Ghost Ramp, a label which specialized in releasing game soundtracks on vinyl. At the time he was brought in to help Rosenfeld, he was also managing a number of other games composers, too.
Though McDermott says deals like Rosenfeld’s, where composers retain ownership of their IP, are increasingly rare, his Minecraft soundtracks have proven to be big business. The score, Minecraft Volume Alpha, which is distributed via TuneCore, was certified gold by the RIAA in 2023, and this month, it was inducted into the Library of Congress by the National Recording Registry, which cited it as an “audio treasure worthy of preservation.”
Since its release on digital service providers, streams of Minecraft Volume Alpha and its companion Volume Beta have averaged 38% year over year growth, and they have been streamed 2.8 billion times worldwide, according to McDermott. McDermott and Rosenfeld have built a surprisingly formidable vinyl business, too. The album, distributed by Ghostly, has sold over 200,000 units to date globally. Rosenfeld even has fans of his own who often congregate in a Discord server devoted to talking about his work, which includes the scores for other games such as Catacomb Snatch and Wanderstop.
But it’s not all fun and games for Rosenfeld. He thinks that by not selling the score to Microsoft, he might have sacrificed his chance to make future soundtracks for the Minecraft franchise — and it’s true that since he declined Microsoft’s offer once and for all, Rosenfeld has not written anything for the game, with Microsoft instead turning to other composers. But because many Minecraft players are nostalgic for his original soundtrack, the score for A Minecraft Movie, composed by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, interpolates it — giving Rosenfeld some upside from the blockbuster’s success.
In the end, Rosenfeld feels he made the right choice. “I don’t want to be stuck with the same thing for the next 50 years,” he says of Minecraft, and now, he can turn his attention to the new scoring gigs that excite him.
Here, Rosenfeld and McDermott speak to Billboard about the strange business of scoring for games and building a living off of Minecraft. “I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s a real argument that Daniel’s music is up there for the most heard audio by humans in history,” says McDermott.
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