byTaylor Soper onSep 16, 2013 at 9:49 amSeptember 17, 2013 at 9:01 pm

Nearly every video game today needs some type of sound and/or music to match the visuals, and with the advent of mobile, social and casual gaming in the past few years, this has resulted in more video game composers being hired.

That’s the finding froma study done bySoundCon, which took aUSA Today report from a few weeks ago about the top-10 fastest-growing jobs and dug a little deeper to find out how video games have impacted the employment of music composers.

The USA Today study found that music directors and composers accounted for the third-fastest growing job sector, with a 178 percent 10-year job growth rate according to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. USA Today noted more original music in commercials and movies as a cause for this.

But using thatsame data from the BLS, SoundCon found that the number of composing jobs remained flat until 2009, when growth in the space took off. As the graph above shows, SoundCon found that the dramatic increase was largely due to the arrival of Apple’s App Store and the Facebook Application Developer.

“The games need developers to make them and the developers need composers to write music for them,” SoundCon said.

SoundCon is based in Seattle and runs theGameSoundCon conference every year. Check out thefull report write-up here.