A TV pays once and then reports forever. A game sync pays once and reports nothing. That one fact shapes every clause in the licence.
Clear a track for a TV drama and the upfront fee is only the start. The broadcaster files a cue sheet, a log of every piece of music in the programme, and each transmission then generates through the societies for years. The fee buys the placement; the keeps a meter running behind it.
Games broke that model from the start. There's no broadcast, so no cue sheet. No society meter runs when a player hears the track, and the game can't report plays either: one player loops a track for forty hours, another never opens the menu it lives in. The use is interactive, triggered by the player rather than scheduled by a broadcaster, so the per-transmission machinery of film and TV has nothing to attach to. With nothing to meter, game music gets priced the only way left: a buyout, one negotiated fee for a defined grant of rights, with no running behind it.
Both halves of the still need clearing. licenses (the synchronisation right) and licenses (the use), the same split-rights problem as any screen placement. If the song's shares sit with three publishers, all three say yes or the placement dies. A buyout doesn't simplify the . It changes what the cleared rights are worth over time, because everything the game will ever do with the track is priced on day one.
Paid once, reported never. That drives the rest of this module: why the scope of the grant is the whole negotiation, why streamers get carved out, and why a fund reading a catalogue's sync history should score game income very differently from film and TV income.