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Music streaming as a protocol: why I was wrong about Audius

Posted on December 1, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Last week I wrote about blockchain-based streaming platform Audius in this newsletter. I criticized the strategy of ‘becoming the anti-SoundCloud’ and its plans for dealing with takedowns while recognizing the exciting potential of a more complex music economy. The next day Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst released a new Interdependence podcast episode where they go in conversation with the Audius founders. It made me completely change my mind about the platform.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss Audius: separating the content & functionality layer is one of the keys to unlocking a new music economy.

Protocol or platform, not service

Audius should be thought of as a decentralized platform rather than as a startup or streaming service. While there is a team behind the project, it seems they mostly work to bring into existence the components outlined in their whitepaper (PDF). These aspects are open-sourced and governed by the user community of the protocol.

While a service’s success is dependent on whatever interface is slapped on to the technical infrastructure, a protocol is less dependent on any one interface. For example, a company poorly redesigning an email client isn’t going to kill email, but it may kill the app or the company behind it. The most exciting aspect of Audius is not the current interface; it’s that they’re trying to create a protocol for digital music that could have any number of interfaces plug into it.

Clipped from the Audius whitepaper linked above.

One of the most important elements of that protocol is a concept I was previously very skeptical about.

Artist-determined stream pricing

Audius wants to let artists set a per-stream rate for their tracks, so if someone wants $1 / stream, they could do so. If they want something close to whatever are the current average Spotify or Apple rates, that’s possible too.

Why I was skeptical about per-stream rates is that it creates a form of metered streaming: load up your wallet and watch the currency tick away as you listen to music. If you’re creating a SoundCloud lookalike (or: ‘like Soundcloud, but better’) to fit into the current landscape of streaming services, then metered streaming is a constraint that will inevitably scare users off. It won’t just scare people off in the sense that they won’t want to load up their wallet if they don’t know what they’re going to listen to yet, but more importantly it will have people make economical decisions about established micro-behaviours around music listening. I think in the end, that would be stressful and exhausting and users would stop coming back. However I’ve come to realize I’m wrong about this.

Differently priced music does not have to live in the same streaming interface. Lower-priced music might be what fuels background-listening type radio apps. Higher-priced music may be at the center of interfaces that connect you to new releases by your favourite artists. There are some pieces of classical music that I listen to maybe once a year, that I value more than some music that I listen to weekly. Per-stream pricing could help make up for the fact that that classical piece gets only 1 yearly stream from me versus 52 streams for a random track — whose creator I don’t even know — in a playlist I use to focus on writing.

What Mat and Holly communicate very well in their podcast with Audius is that ‘music’ is not one thing, yet the online landscape doesn’t reflect that fact well. To some degree, the compensation model embedded in the licenses dictates a lot of the user experience. In the past I’ve led teams at two music streaming services wanting to do things differently and while you can go quite a long way, in the end you have to exist in a landscape dictated by just one economic game: maximization of streams.

A change to that landscape would be refreshing and a welcome way to generate more revenue streams.

Content / interface-layer challenges

There is still a whole range of challenges to deal with in such a system. Who sets the per-stream price for example? Is it whoever has the highest degree of ownership of the sound recording? What if they change the price while it’s live and because of that the track is no longer playable through certain interfaces? Or if it all lives in the same interface: do you interrupt playback to give people a warning before an expensive track starts playing? What if their phone is in their pocket? These are just some of the design problems developers would have to think about in a decentralized system with such principles.

It’s possible that the decentralization of the functionality layer doesn’t go as far as I imagine. In any case, Audius or the apps using the protocol will have to deal with the existing national and international copyright regimes which inevitably dictate some of the economics.

In the end, it’s not about Audius versus SoundCloud; it’s about creating a new layer for music streaming. Imagining music streaming as a protocol, rather than a competitive space of services, is refreshing though. It allows for a rethink of the principles underpinning the digital music landscape without going through the arduous mental exercise of imagining small iterative improvements to solve streaming’s flaws.

Why Audius needs to be more like Roblox to succeed in creating a music economy

Posted on November 24, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Recently blockchain-based music streaming service Audius distributed tokens to 10,000 of its top users, giving them ownership of the platform and rights to vote on its future plus make changes to its structure.

While its advisory board — which includes Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and EA Games co-founder Bing Gordon — is impressive (though all-male), I have my reservations about the platform. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Despite my reservations, I do believe Audius is on to something. When it distributed the tokens, they didn’t all go to artists, but also fans. Music is in desperate need for a digital economy more complex than one-directionally spreading out subscription fees over stream counts.

The ‘anti-SoundCloud’

From the beginning, Audius set itself up as “like SoundCloud, but not SoundCloud.” There’s a real difficulty in positioning yourself that way. SoundCloud is a company with more than half a billion USD in funding to date. It has relations with most of the music business, technical integrations with all kinds of hardware & software, and has spent over a decade building up its community, team and infrastructure.

The standards for music streaming are incredibly high now compared to the landscape that the current incumbents started out in. While I definitely think SoundCloud and other music streaming services of that generation are leaving space for newcomers to claim, I think it’s important to focus on what in particular a newcomer can do better and excel in that. In terms of doing a particular thing better, I’d argue Instagram has become the anti-SoundCloud.

How do you deliver a good user experience and an audience to people? How do you get them to regularly visit your app / platform? How do you grow beyond the front of the adoption curve? All of these have answers, but how do you do that better than others? Setting yourself up as a one-size-fits-all service creates expectations you can’t fulfill.

Takedown issues

On to a more complicated matter. Audius, as a decentralized service, will pass takedown requests on to uploaders who will have to take action. If it can’t be resolved, it moves to an arbitration committee made up of Audius users:

“That group can vote on whether a track legally should be removed or its revenue reattributed, and both plaintiffs and committee members must put up a small financial stake they’ll lose if their claim is frivolous or they make erroneous decisions.”

I appreciate the idealism in letting its community resolve these issues. The financial stake part also makes sense, assuming the party issuing is on the platform, but it also reads like the type of maximalist thought usually associated with blockchain or “disruptive startup” culture. It assumes as a newcomer it can set a new status quo that everyone will have to interact with — even people who are not on the platform. In actuality, as a newcomer you’re an outlier and the type of strategy you have to employ is growth, so you can actually become the status quo.

What does not help growth is artists finding parts of their catalogue on the platform without uploading it themselves and then going through a tedious and risky process to right the wrong.

A more complex economy

Another company I had similar reservations about in terms of being able to stand out as a compelling streaming platform is Resonate, a community-owned cooperative. However what excites me about Audius and Resonate are their visions for a different music streaming economy. In particular, giving fans and artists equal participation in that economy.

Money in streaming flows in one direction and that’s away from fans. It feels like that’s the point, but it’s also a limitation. There’s a reductionist vision that music services are solely about listening to music. Yet what could be created by incentivizing platform participation? What if the $10/month subscription fee was more like an entrance ticket or season pass and there’s additional, optional value exchange happening on the platform, much like in video games?

Some users wouldn’t be able to afford a fee higher than that $10. As a matter of fact, I know music fans who only stream from free services. By participating in the platform’s economy they could still unlock perks they’re after. They could do so by creating value on the platform, e.g. by building experiences, creating fan art and other value for communities, or by participating in platform improvements like the cleaning of metadata or, I suppose, DMCA takedown arbitration.

This type of thing has been happening in games for years. A current prominent example being Roblox (est. 2004), which recently saw Lil Nas X perform in-game.

The starting point isn’t the economy though — it’s to envision what you want players to be able to do in the world created for them. From engagement flow the opportunities to shape an economy (another reason why I’m skeptical of consumer-facing startups whose value propositions focus on the economy more than the user experience). In order to create robust digital economies around music, the likely question to figure out is how to create a compelling platform for fan culture at large.

Then starting by focusing on a specific problem.

What does digital strategy in a user-centric streaming landscape look like?

Posted on November 17, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

The year is 2023. After intensive lobbying, the governments of the US, the EU, and Britain have decreed changes to the way music streaming services pay out artists. Instead of pooling all of users’ revenue together and distributing it pro-rata based on the number of streams, the money will now be divided based on listening-share per user. That means, if a listener’s playback is composed for 50% of one artist’s music, that artist will get 50% of the revenue that specific user generated.

With new economics, the game changes – and so does the way we measure success.

Why user-centric is a paradigm shift beyond the economics

A common argument against the user-centric model is that it doesn’t necessarily bring more money in, would be costly to transition to, and might not end up in radically different sums at the bottom of royalty statements. The problem with the studies that these arguments are based on is that the studies took data generated by the current status quo of streaming and ran it through a new system. A different system means different incentives and would have led to a different data set.

More importantly, it changes the overall game as Spotify’s then-chief economist Will Page pointed out in 2018:

“Under ‘pro rata,’ an artist is less concerned with diversity and will simply prefer the platform whose users stream their music most. Under ‘user-centric,’ artists prefer streaming platforms where their listeners exhibit less diversity in taste.”

The game in user-centric streaming is to make sure your listeners spend as much time on you as possible. As an artist, you want to make sure they’re a) paying for a subscription, and b) listening to you primarily. What you don’t care about is their exact number of listens.

A familiar metric will stay just as important: your number of monthly listeners. What will become more important, is a new metric: average listening-share per user (ALPU).

ALPU: average listening-share per user

Fast-forward to imaginary 2023 again. Music marketeers are obsessed with ALPU, which they can monitor in the dashboards of popular streaming services. Some of the tactics they use to increase ALPU are:

Getting fans to turn disable Autoplay features on streaming services, since it’s better if playback stops rather than moves on to another artist.
Prioritizing profile-focused platforms over catalogue & discovery-focused platforms. While getting discovered is still important, the money is made when you get people to stream on high-ALPU platforms.
Move fast on new platforms, since being first on a new service is a massive advantage for ALPU due to the fact that there’s not much else to stream yet.

It would slowly lead to a landscape that looks more like that of newsletters and Patreon communities in the sense that they’re isolated and there’s not much discovery between them. As a matter of fact, Patreon stated they’re not a discovery platform up until a recent funding round. Their now-deleted blog post was cached by the Wayback Machine and can still be read. In it, their then-SVP Product Wyatt Jenkins said:

“Because we’re not focused on discovery, we’re not constantly trying to recommend new creators to your fans. It takes time to build an audience, for a fan to become passionate enough about you as a creator to become a paying patron. We respect that relationship. We’re not here to market other creators to your patrons.”

While a user-centric payments landscape doesn’t exist yet for music steaming, it’s useful to think about what it would look like. While I think something healthy can flourish from such a landscape, it’s not a cure-all for today’s most important problems. For example, a shift to user-centric is among the demands in the Justice at Spotify campaign by the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, because they claim that pro-rata “puts artists in competition with each other.” I suspect a user-centric economy would make that competition much more fierce.

Finally, ALPU already makes for a useful thought experiment at present. Before you get to revenue, you have to garner attention. What’s your attention share of your most dedicated fans? How do you stay top of mind and have fans checking in on you, so you can get your latest music, merch, or livestream tickets under the eyes and into their shopping carts? Shifting to user-centric would mean the streaming landscape is more closely aligned with the same metrics used to build dedicated fan bases.

Are investors looking for a fire sale in independent live music?

Posted on November 10, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Live Nation‘s head Michael Rapino has called the plans of ex-WME music chief Marc Geiger to acquire 51% stakes in struggling venues a “fire sale“.

The background

Geiger recently announced a $75m fund to create a “partnership plan” called SaveLive. It will see the fund buying up stakes of at least 51% and “backstop all these clubs”. This received very mixed reactions, partly due to the altruistic-sounding name, despite there obviously being more to it than that. The New York Times sees potential:

“As SaveLive partners, Geiger said, they would gain economies of scale as well as access to favourable deals for ticketing or sponsorship — suggesting that SaveLive would, to some degree, resemble a mom-and-pop version of Live Nation or AEG.”

Why the shade from Rapino?

For most of this year, I’ve been concerned about the ability of venues to maintain their independence beyond the pandemic. Then back in August, paired with their Q2 financial results, Live Nation announced their intention to expand:

“We believe that over the next 24 months there’ll be ongoing opportunities for us to expand our global footprints in foreign and international markets that we’ve have been looking to get into and build some businesses around.”

How they’ll get into those markets is unclear, but the company has a history of expansion through acquisitions. It also bears keeping in mind that the above statement came at the end of the same quarter that saw Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund acquire a $500M stake in Live Nation.

The differentiator between Geiger’s SaveLive and Live Nation seems to be the geographical focus. Rapino opines that US independent venues won’t sell cheaply, because “there’s a lot of capital out there.“

What’s the take-away?

It’s a waste of time trying to figure out who’s right or wrong in these types of debates, because that’s not why the actors of the debates participate in them. What’s valuable about it is that you can spot intentions and see headlines that clearly point towards trends.

To me, the takeaway here is: independent music is at risk of becoming less independent. That’s always so, but more so now. Prominent music business veterans can raise funds of tens of millions of dollars and incumbents have all but announced their intention to spend cash to expand.

It may be worth checking in on your local music venue organisations and seeing what forms of support they can use. Each territory has their own unique challenges, economically and politically, so it’s a global plight with a local character.

This soon-to-launch Minecraft club changed my mind about virtual raves

Posted on October 6, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

An exclusive preview of a Minecraft venue based on a closed down Berlin night club called Griessmuehle. A look at the user experience behind virtual club design.

Early on in the lockdown I threw a few virtual raves, but decided they’re not for me. Simply put: I thought they’re not engaging enough to compete with all the other things I could be doing. I hear you: they have an important role. I agree with that, but I think they typically do poorly in terms of fulfilling that role.

4 key roles for virtual raves:

A place for a scene to connect.
A place to discover new music & talent.
A place to for artist-fan connection.
A place for entertainment.

With very few exceptions, I feel these roles are fulfilled better in other places. Scenes connect on Instagram and to a lesser extent Soundcloud nowadays. These platforms are also excellent ways to discover new underground music, bootlegs, and remixes that you won’t find on Spotify or other large streaming services.

As for entertainment… There are productions with dozens of millions of dollars in funding at our fingertips through video streaming platforms, television, video games, etc. And personally I enjoy the latter, because I can play games (with friends) while listening to new music. When it’s actually convenient for me.

It’s like virtual raves are fun and engaging for the organizers and performers, but much less so for the audiences.

So if you know me from a nightlife context: that’s why you’re not seeing me at many livestreams and virtual raves. But last week’s look at a new Minecraft club has made me changed my mind.

Inside LiveJar, a virtual club based on a closed real-life venue

Minecraft raves are not new. Perhaps the most prominent organizer that’s still active, Club Matryoshka, started throwing them in the summer of 2019. Around the same time, a Reddit user named throwawayforlewdstuff built a Minecraft version of legendary and notoriously hard-to-get-into Berlin techno club Berghain. This same person, also known as gibier_, has now created a new Minecraft version of another Berlin club together with a group of other artists.

The Minecraft venue is based on Griessmuehle. Which was easier to get into than Berghain, but that difficulty is now inversed. Berghain now functions as an art gallery due to the pandemic, so if you have a ticket, you’re in. However Griessmuehle was forced from the location that the Minecraft venue is based on – you’ll never be able to enter it again. So no matter how well we tackle the damage done to nightlife by extended shutdowns, the reality of real estate development will continue to have an impact on nightlife.

Last week (Sept 30), LiveJar had a beta run to test the server and collect feedback. What follows is a rundown of the experience. I’ll do my best not to give too much away, because I think they’ve captured an important element of good nightlife venues well: photos, videos and stories won’t do it justice – you have to go experience it for yourself.

When you join the server you’re spawned outside Griessmuehle (or LiveJar). As you walk up to the door you’ll see a large and rather unfriendly looking bouncer. You’re also greeted by the ambient sound familiar to anyone who’s ever queued outside a club: muffled techno beats. Sitting comfortably at home for half a year, I’d actually forgotten about that rush just before entering. A mix of anxiety and enthusiasm. I had not realized how much I’ve missed it.

They run the audio through a plug-in called OpenAudioMc, which allows Minecraft server admins to map music to certain areas. When joining the servers as a listener, the plug-in runs in a browser window you keep open in the background. As you move through the map, the music will play through the browser and will change when you switch rooms.

Entering the venue was particularly exciting, because of the familiarity of the layout and how well the team captured certain details. Most importantly, it was fun to just wander around and see what’s going on in familiar places, less familiar places that I actually never spent much time in, and unfamiliar places that the artists added, like extra rooms and floors and certain objects.

A good club will draw you in and make you forget about the world outside. It puts you in a place where time is frozen. A place where you can experience, explore, and interact. I think I spent a good hour exploring the map and I still don’t feel like I’ve seen everything. Since it was a beta, there were not many people around, so it was a bit like showing up at a party way too early. And a rave is not a rave without ravers. Minecraft allows people to customize their avatars, so I’m looking forward to seeing all these areas populated with people in creative costumes.

To make sure people move around the map, the makers have hidden drinks around the map like easter eggs. There are 3 types and each of them has its own effect on the player upon consumption. I won’t spoil what they are. There are also bars in the venue, which allows people to attain these drinks in exchange for donations (powered by tebex.io) that the organizers use to cover their costs, pay DJs, and donate to charity.

The venue’s staff have special controls in their inventory, which allows them to play with the lighting and smoke machine in certain rooms.

Some of these effects are intense. Especially if you’re under the influence of one of the virtual beverages. It can be really disorienting. You will definitely walk into a wall at some point. At first this bothered me, but it also echoes the experience of Berlin’s early techno clubs (well-documented in the WE CALL IT TECHNO! documentary on YouTube). Remember being on the way from the dancefloor to the bar (or vice versa) when the smoke machine fills up the room and you just decide to stay where you are for a moment until the smoke clears up? It’s part of the experience, it’s part of the unknown of these nights that make them so exciting and the admins behind LiveJar have managed to recreate this well.

Currently, the creators of the server are preparing for launch. They’re looking for artists and organizers who want to play on their servers and bring their audiences in. You can get in touch with them (kelit, devBowman, gibier_ aka throwawayforlewdstuf) on their Discord server.

They’re also looking for additional staff members to help with the scenography and an experienced Minecraft server admin in order to scale the experience to more users.

Better than real life?

I feel virtual events have a chance of doing things that you can’t do in real life. Those things are necessary in order to fulfill the criteria outlined in the bullet points at the start of this article. I previously wrote an article about 8 ‘generatives’ that can give virtual events an edge over real life events, so let’s see how LiveJar stacks up:

Magical powers: ✅. Whether it’s the drinks or falling from high distances and living to tell the tale: you’re definitely something more than human on the server.
Interactivity: ✅. An important aspect of the interactivity for me was the exploration aspect as well as trying out the various drinks in various places and seeing what would happen. I set a goal to go out to find a drink and come back to the dancefloor, wait for the wildest smoke and light effects, and then take a drink and see what it’s like (woOoAaoahH). I didn’t actually consider exploration as part of interactivity when I wrote my original article, but it’s definitely an important element.
Context synergy: 🔲. This box will be ticked as soon as they start populating the server with artists. Certain artists and scenes definitely make sense in the context of Minecraft and / or Griessmuehle.
Artist proximity: 🔲. Even though sets have to be pre-recorded due to technical limitations, the organizers expect the DJs to be present for the rave. Even with a handful of people on the server during the beta, there was a lively chat, so I assume this box will be ticked as soon as they launch.
Fan community or scene networking: 🔲. Similar to the previous bullet point. This actually lends itself really well to it. Especially since the map is large with lots of different areas. It’s possible to change the server-wide chat into more localized chats (e.g. you only ‘hear’ people in your area of the map). This makes it possible to have multiple dancefloors and areas with various adjacent scenes hanging out. The admins hadn’t set up the server this way during the beta, but mentioned it had been on their minds.

Just one caveat: the requirement to purchase Minecraft could be a barrier to bringing a scene onto the server. Will people who have already purchased a console or mobile version of Minecraft also purchase the PC version?
Global proximity: ✅. It seemed like most people on the server were French (despite 95% of the conversations happening in English). So yes, definitely a good way to connect scenes across borders and get music fans from various cities into the same room and exposed to each other (an aspect normally reserved for touring DJs and traveling fans).
A role to play for the viewer: ✅. Like I wrote above: this will be so exciting with more people on there, with customized avatars, bringing increased interactivity and life to the various areas of the map.
FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out: ❓. You tell me. Do you think you’d attend the launch event?

One more time in case you skipped over it above: you can stay up to date or get in touch with LiveJar by joining their Discord server at https://discord.gg/DXvrx3W.

As for Griessmuehle: they’ve since found a new location to reopen.

What BITKRAFT’s recent investments suggest about music’s future and the metaverse

Posted on August 11, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Forget the usual suspects: venture capital firm BITKRAFT is easily one of the most interesting funds to watch in the entertainment space. Since the start of June, they have participated in 5 funding rounds totalling over $44 million into companies pioneering possible futures for digital media.

With music mostly detached from its “real world” context of live gigs, it has become obvious that music’s virtual context of livestreams, virtual events, and online communities is set to shape tastes, genres and experiences. Professionals from across the industry, from labels to studios to artists, are increasingly involved in virtual aspects of our culture. Two recent examples:

Sony Music Entertainment is actively recruiting engineers and designers familiar with the Unreal 3D engine.
Entertainment management CAA recently signed its first avatar: Miquela.

So what do BITKRAFT’s recent investees enable? A look at 3.

Koji

Co-founded by Dmitry Shapiro, who previously founded Veoh and served as CTO of MySpace Music, Koji is a tool that makes it easy to remix posts for social media.

The posts are shareable and interactive, allowing people to remix them using content from various platforms, so Koji sees them more like “mini-apps“:

“If you’ve experienced WeChat Mini Programs, Kojis are the cross-platform, standards-based, modern versions of that.”

What appears to be the strategy, is for other platforms to allow these interactive forms of media inside of them, similar to how most social media platforms now have Giphy integrations to bring GIFs from the Giphy platform into your favourite social network.

So that sets it apart from other remix platforms, like TikTok or audiovisual mashup platform Coub which emphasise the on-platform experience. Unlike TikTok, Coub is not a walled garden, but most of the activity related to the platform seems to be happening in the garden regardless.

What does it mean for music?

Remix culture has gone through multiple iterations and isn’t done yet. Since the start of the digital era, we’ve seen these important steps for music’s remix culture:

Anyone with a computer being able to acquire (through piracy or a purchase) music production software at reasonable costs and distributing their creations through networks and filesharing apps. For example the rapper Benefit becoming an internet underground legend with a $5 mic and a $12 sound card.
As time went on, the above development spawned mash-up culture which moved from filesharing platforms over to the blogosphere.
SoundCloud emerged and made it even easier to follow and exchange with other producers around the world, spawning remix-heavy genre subcultures like Moombahton, ‘EDM Trap’, and ‘Cloudrap’.
Anyone with a mobile phone being able to produce, mix or remix media.
‘Remix’ becoming a default interaction through the dynamics of Snapchat, Instagram Stories, Musically and TikTok as people use face filters, music, and various imagery as overlays to interact with friends and connect to new people.

Koji’s bet seems to be that there’s room for remixable media inside these platforms – think embedding a TikTok post (content) into an Instagram Story (context), but then being able to change elements of the content independently from context.

If this sounds vague, go play around with Koji: open one and hit the remix button.

Short version: we’ll see remixable content appear in countless contexts and will be able to move that content from one context (e.g. Fortnite) to another (e.g. Instagram Stories) without having it attached to the context (e.g. a screenshot of something (content) inside Fortnite (context)).

This will allow for an integrated web where you can interact with media from very day-to-day layers (like photo-based social media) to layers further removed from the physical world (like virtual reality). Like that time Zuckerberg demoed Oculus VR and Priscilla Chan (in ‘the real world’) called him while he was plugged into VR (see the Mixed reality section).

Voicemod

Sticking to the theme of layers: Voicemod allows people to adjust their voice digitally in real-time. In a virtual environment, you can design your avatar however you wish, but unless you’re great at voice acting your voice will sound kind of ‘normal’.

In more every day terms: we’ve all seen Instagram and Snapchat filters that add dog features to friends’ faces — Voicemod makes the voice equivalent of that.

While their technology seems targeted towards demographics in immersive, fully virtual environments like online games or VR-environments, they also cater to YouTubers.

One of the things they’ll do with their investment is double down on mobile, for which they’ve already teamed up with T-Pain who’s well-known for his use of auto-tune.

What does it mean for music?

The first aspect to point out is that voice modification has become increasingly easy and cheap to achieve, even in real-time. The second aspect is that BITKRAFT and Voicemod see a future with a high adoption of voice modification and the avatarisation of voice.

We already have virtual pop stars, so the boundary between virtual and ‘real’ is blurring, especially now that we can simulate elements that up until now were artefacts of “the real world” like our voice. Whereas today’s virtual pop stars didn’t emerge from the virtual landscape, future music personalities could come from this landscape, including their pre-programmed voices. Consider an influencer who’s mostly known for their in-game personality; now what if that influencer becomes popular for their music?

It’s the next generation of digital native.

Playable Worlds

The first thing you need to know about this startup is that it’s founded by Raph Koster, who was the lead designer for Ultima Online (UO). UO was an incredibly influential MMORPG: massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. It was released in 1997 – years before Runescape and World of Warfcraft. And people are still playing it today, lauding its open world of worlds where gameplay is as much player-made as it is scripted.

The next thing you need to know is that Playable Worlds intend to accelerate the development of a concept called the metaverse. The metaverse is the idea of being able to plug into a virtual environment that connects all kinds of different virtual environments. Minecraft and Roblox are often mentioned as examples due to the ability for people to creatively craft various environments and objects. Fortnite also has characteristics of this, as beyond a gaming environment it now also contains an environment to hang out in and perhaps even enjoy a concert called Party Royale (pictured above).

Playable Worlds‘ first goal is to create a “cloud-native sandbox MMO” game, which sounds reminiscent of aforementioned Ultima Online. Sam Engelbardt, one of the company’s investors, says that “Koster’s vision and demonstrated ability to give players a compelling sandbox for the expression of their digital identities makes him exactly the sort of founder that he likes to back. Englebardt is backing companies that he believes will lay the foundation for the metaverse.”

What does it mean for music?

While Koji and Voicemod are tools that help people immerse inside and across “the metaverse”, Playable Worlds’ team is building out the technology to enable such a metaverse and then building a game with that technology.

Soon, our assumed digital identities will be as important as our given day-to-day identity – which is something that has actually already occurred for many people in the earlier days of the internet with its internet forums, chatrooms, and networks, before using your real name and identity were the status quo.

With that emerging landscape come new types of fan culture and many new possibilities to connect with people who may have a variety of identities across virtual environments. If that sounds niche: that’s how it starts. Ultima Online provided a stepping stone towards the landscape of Twitch, Fortnite, and other virtual experiences which the music industry is committing itself to now, 20 years later.

If this post feels overwhelming or just too “out there” and you’re curious about how music has already been impacted by gaming, I suggest reading my article Hidden in plain sight: a global underground dance music scene with millions of fans from 2016. It was a bit “out there” at that time too, but by now it’s obvious.

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