Could virtual music stars reach millions of people without doing so through communal experiences? It’s something we’re bound to find out in the next decade.
Virtual stars are not a new thing. Vocaloid avatar Hatsune Miku has been around for over a decade and opened for Lady Gaga in 2014. Another type of avatars are virtual YouTubers who have been around for about half a decade. Arguably the most well-known avatar of that group, Kazuna AI, recently performed at Porter Robinson’s online Secret Sky Festival. Chinese streaming giant iQiyi’s research into virtual idols has shown that 64% of people aged 14 to 24 in the country follow one or more avatar stars.
Thus far, the music stars in this area of entertainment have followed a similar strategy to real-life pop stars: getting on a (virtual) stage and singing to many fans. An AI-powered chatbot named Xiaoice shows the potential for another approach.
Xiaoice is a virtual assistant designed to keep users engaged by forming deep emotional connections to them. The result? Over 600 million people have tried the bot out over the past years with many of them becoming hyper-engaged. The company, spun off from Microsoft, estimates that “half the interactions with AI software that have taken place worldwide have been with Xiaoice.” The AI’s fans are 75% male and reading about some of the ways they describe interacting with her may remind one of the movie Her.
Xiaoice is a type of mass media to which each user feels a personal connection, because instead of one-to-many communication (like pop stars), the virtual friend is able to have one-to-one communication at scale, much like Siri and Alexa. The communication model it uses is hard to apply for a human being who can only do one thing in one place at one time, but with improvements in AI and the increasing virtualization of music the one-to-one model is easier to utilize by the music business.
I’m not aware of a one-to-one virtual music idol at scale (do leave a comment if you know of something), but I have no doubt that something like this will emerge over the next years, no doubt using channels like TikTok as part of a user acquisition funnel and becoming part of mainstream consciousness that way.
Interestingly, I think this discussion mimics one of the cultural discussions we are having around music right now as exhaustion sets in trying to attain higher streaming numbers for unsatisfactory incomes. So as musicians explore models beyond extracting small amounts of money from giant numbers of listeners — such as membership models like Patreon — we may see virtual idols mimic the cultural shift in music, but apply the dynamics at a scale that non-AI creators can’t employ.
As long as that doesn’t lead to a situation where AI idols start cannibalising the membership revenues of non-AI performers, that scale may not be an issue beyond the fact that the bargaining power may distort other markets that musicians rely on for income. While the next year’s theme will be a return to normal, the next decade will stretch and upend the meaning of normal.