Game of Thrones is the soundtrack album

Soundtrack album

A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television program. In some cases, not all the tracks from the movie are included in the album; however there are rare cases of songs in the trailers that do not appear in...

 for the first season of the eponymous fantasy TV show

Game of Thrones (TV series)

Game of Thrones is an American medieval fantasy television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Based on author George R. R. Martin's best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, the first of which is called A Game of Thrones, the television series debuted in...

 by the U.S. cable channel HBO. The album was composed by the German composer Ramin Djawadi

Ramin Djawadi

Ramin Djawadi is a German composer of orchestral music for film and television. He was born in Duisburg, Germany to an Iranian father and German mother...

 and published by Varèse Sarabande

Varèse Sarabande

Varèse Sarabande is an American record label, distributed by Universal Music Group, which specializes in film scores and original cast recordings. It aims to reissue rare or unavailable albums as well as newer releases by artists no longer under a contract...

 in June 2011.

The music is instrumental

Instrumental

An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or singing, although it might include some non-articulate vocal input; the music is primarily or exclusively produced by musical instruments....

 and features one major theme, the Main Title, which accompanies the show's opening credits.

Production and release

The soundtrack to Game of Thrones was originally slated to be composed by Stephen Warbeck

Stephen Warbeck

Stephen Warbeck is an English composer, best known for his film and television scores.Warbeck was born in Southampton. He first became known for the music for Prime Suspect and won an Academy Award for his score for Shakespeare in Love...

. On 2 February 2011, only ten weeks prior to the show's premiere, it was reported that Warbeck had left the project and Ramin Djawadi had been commissioned to write the music instead.

The album was made available for download on iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

 on 14 June 2011, together with a "digital booklet

Booklet

Booklet may refer to:* A small book or group of pages* Postage stamp booklet, made up of one or more small panes of postage stamps in a cardboard cover...

". It was released on CD on 28 June 2011, 41 days after the show's premiere.

Reception

Richard Buxton of Tracksounds wrote an ambivalent review, calling the album a "valiant effort" and Djawadi's "most consistently satisfying work to date", but criticized the main theme as falling short of the expectations raised by the opening credits' animated sequence, and the score as a whole as "never quite reaching what it could have been".

The main theme has inspired "countless" tributes and cover version

Cover version

In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a contemporary or previously recorded, commercially released song or popular song...

s, according to TV.com

TV.com

TV.com is a website owned by CBS Interactive. The site covers television and focuses on English-language shows made or broadcast in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Japan...

. These include a violin version by Jason Yang and a bleeping "8-bit" remix in the style of early video game music.

Track listing