Tag: Roblox

Livestreaming and the horseless carriage syndrome

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Livestreaming is a concert without an audience in proximity to the musicians. Marshall McLuhan, in his seminal Understanding Media, argued that humans share an ineptitude in understanding the nature and the effects of new technologies. We cannot help but view these technologies as a new form of an old technology we’ve become accustomed to. McLuhan called this the horseless carriage syndrome, because he used the example of the first cars and how people perceived them. In the late 19th-Century people saw automobiles simply as horseless carriages. Moreover, the first cars looked like horseless carriages with the driver at the front on top. Similarly, TV was first seen as radio with moving pictures. And now livestreams are viewed as concerts without an audience. The problem, according to McLuhan, is that we place too much emphasis on the content whereas the medium is actually what matters more. In other words, we should focus on the potential of a new technology and how it can affect change in the way we think and act in the world. Let’s explore what it means to imagine livestreams not as concerts without in-person audiences, but instead as a new medium with its own specific affective capabilities. Furthermore, this medium requires its own language and marketing.

Approaching a new medium in terms of its predecessors

Cherie Hu has just written an excellent piece confronting us all with the disconnect between the hype for livestreaming we’ve seen during the pandemic and the demand that now exists for them. She calls for a “much-needed reality check about the viability of the format as a standalone business model for concerts.” And there lies the horseless carriage syndrome. Hu critiques the fact that people within the industry have put a total addressable market (TAM) up for livestreams that is bigger than that for concerts. That TAM comes from the basic notion that a livestream is a concert for people who cannot attend the in-person gig due to geographic constrictions. It’s a good sell, but in Hu’s words, we’re better off talking about a “total unaddressable market” in that case.

The idea of viewing livestreaming, and its potential, in terms of how much people want to attend an in-person gig also comes back in recent M&A examples. When Live Nation acquired Veeps, they did so because they want to equip the venues they operate for livestreaming. The thinking behind that is that it will increase the scope, the TAM, for those concerts. In the words of Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino,

“this business is a compliment and promotion to the core concert … we’ll be streaming a lot more of our concerts to fans that can’t show up to the event, or some that may want to stream on our app when they’re at the event because of some added value of digital backrooms or camera angles … Looking to the future live streams will continue to unlock access for fans – whether they are tuning into a sold out show in their hometown, or watching their favorite artist play in a city halfway around the world. The most critical element of live streaming is the artist on stage.

Again and again in this quote we see Rapino likening the livestream to the concert. He thus keeps the concert, Live Nation’s core business, the core of the fan experience. He even goes so far as to say that the artist on stage is the most critical element of any livestream. Of course, he also hints at what differentiates the livestream as a medium from a concert. For example, he mentions the variety of camera angles or backstage access. In other words, there’s levels of interactivity of intimacy connected to livestreaming that differ wildly from the in-person concert. The latter gives a fan experience centred around a shared feeling of energy-exchange between fan and artist. The simple fact of having multiple bodies in one room creates a shared energy unequal to anything else.

Moving to the virtual

What’s interesting is that even people who are heavily invested in changing the narratives around the horseless carriage of livestreaming fall into its trap. Jon Vlassopulos, global head of music at Roblox, still talks about the metaverse as “an infinite venue.” To be fair, he also reframes the livestream outside of the concert-terminology:

“They’re a unique, creative and novel way for them to express themselves and their music and engage with their fans in a hyper-immersive, social setting.”

For Vlassopulos this also means that the TAM for these livestreams, or virtual in-game events, are endless. And that’s the kind of horseless carriage comparison that Hu is trying to steer away from. She, helpfully, points out that just making virtual shows more engaging isn’t necessarily going to translate into more engagement. Vlassopulos, in contract, tries to sell the idea of a concert in Roblox as a way for artists to reach as many people in one go as they can do with an 18-month world tour. But we shouldn’t be comparing those two things. They’re separate and we need to start thinking about them as such.

Let’s drive a car

One way of thinking about livestreaming as separate from in-person concerts is to look at the medium and its distribution. I’ve written previously about a ‘waterfall strategy’ for livestreams [paywall]. In that piece I also reach back to McLuhan and his notion of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. The former is high-fidelity and low-participation, while the latter is low-fidelity and high-participation. In terms of livestreams I called the type of quick-and-dirty Twitch or Instagram livestreams cool media while the highly produced efforts of a BTS, Billie Eilish, and Dua Lipa were hot media. Of course, the first two of those did a great job of including more interactive elements that showed the potential of livestreams as a medium. However, only the latter focused on distribution after the original livestream date. The medium of the livestream, especially, lends itself to this type of continued engagement. It should, then, be a focus from the moment of inception.

In terms of McLuhan, what really affects us in a concert is that the medium allows us to feel the energy of loud music and other bodies moving in unison. And what really affects us in a livestream comes from a feeling of intimacy with the artist, a moment of interactivity between artist and fan(s), and a close-up way to watch a musician in action. Moreover, any good livestream will not simply point cameras at musicians, but use the function of the camera, its angles and the way it can direct viewing. Jeff Daniels, who besides being a great actor is also a singer-songwriter, has some great insights in how this works:

“[I]t’s got to hit them different, these live streams. I’ve seen some artists go on the Ryman stage or wherever and they try the light show and the whole thing, and it’s everything except the audience. Instead of trying to give them something that it isn’t, is there something that that doesn’t do? That’s what I’ve tried to figure out with the live stream. It’s like shooting a medium close-up when you’re film acting. And if you’ve got a floating camera like we do — our third camera kind of moves in and out — that’s bringing the audience in. You’re showing them where to focus. It’s like the difference between movies and theater. Theater you sit in the audience and you’ve gotta be the editor. You have to look over there, or cut to him. You’re the one turning your head. In movies, we do that for you. We cut to her, or to the car.”

That, in a nutshell, is how the medium of the livestream changes the consumption of the content – music – from an in-person concert. In other words, we need to start thinking about livestreaming as a medium starting with a camera, with an image.

Let’s get others to drive along

So, if you think about livestreaming like Daniels does you need to find musicians who can play in front of a camera. That means they need to pull in the viewers one by one and give them all the feeling they’re playing specifically for them. But before that connection can take place, fans need to be convinced to buy a ticket and watch the livestream in the first place. If anything should be taken away from Hu’s piece it’s that telling people that a livestream is an online concert isn’t going to work. Instead communication around livestreams should focus on what makes it unique. A year ago, Bas wrote a great piece showcasing 8 generatives that can help livestreams or virtual music shows stand out from real-life experiences.

In your communication and promotion for a livestream, then, focus on what makes this medium unique.

  • Intimacy
  • Interactivity
  • Storytelling elements
  • The feeling of someone playing just for you, as a fan
  • Ideally, the livestream should really be live. Messaging should then focus on that ‘live live’ element
  • It’s a unique experience that’s unlike any other way to experience music

Wrapping up: a new art form

My conclusion here is short. Livestreaming is a new art form and expressions of it should reflect that. Use the medium of livestreaming and the cameras to bring out the creative vision of artists. Push for producers and musicians alike to bring out the art of the livestream. Moving forward we’ll see more and more creative interpretations of this art form. In parallel to that, communication around livestream should reflect that. The use cases and the marketing should help amplify getting broader audiences on board with the unique medium of livestreaming.

What do you buy when you buy merch?

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Merchandise is important. It’s important for fans who can express their fandom. It’s important for artists and other rightsholders who use it as an extra revenue stream. But recently I’ve been wondering what you actually buy when you buy merch as a fan. And consequently, what that means for artists who look at merch as a form of revenue. It’s important to ask what kind of merch you want to sell and who your audiences are for it. Especially in a world where platforms like Amazon Music, Instagram and Twitter improve their creator-focus by making it increasingly easy to sell merch I see three major answers to the title of this piece:

  • You buy something physical like a t-shirt, a mug, or a record or something virtual like a skin, an AR filter, or a digital download
  • You buy status, showing off your fandom and gaining access to an in-crowd of superfans
  • You buy into an artist and show your love and, more and more, gain access to the artist

The physical and the virtual

Let’s start by going back to 2019, pre-pandemic. atVenu, a commerce platform for selling merch while on tour, shared data showing that on average people attending concerts continued to spend more because they were buying more merch items year-over-year. This increased the average dollar amount punters spent as well. A positive trend then, but looking at what concert-goers mainly bought the data showed that the most popular item was still a t-shirt and then preferably a black one. Moreover, further data by atVenu from 2019 shows that on average artists bring 17 items to a show while only 4 items bring in 75% of all revenue. This means it’s worthwhile thinking about the combination of merch items you sell during a show. Definitely a t-shirt, preferably a record, then some other form of apparel – depending on your genre it can be a cap or a hoodie or a longsleeve, etc. – and finally something else like the aforementioned mug.

When we move from the physical to the virtual I often think about gaming more than music. That’s mostly because in gaming virtual merch-type items are already a big business. And when music flows into the world of gaming we see the results. Of course, there’s Lil Nas X his famous Roblox show. In an interview with Gamefam, Roblox global head of music Jon Vlassopulos explained how you “could dance together using custom, exclusive emotes, throw snowballs at each other, dress up in custom merch, hunt for coins, etc.” Moreover, these virtual merch items drove “seven figures in merch sales.” And it’s not just an artist like Lil Nas X who drives these sales. Oana Ruxandra, chief digital officer at Warner Music Group, told the CogX conference this year that Why Don’t We‘s Roblox concert also involved good sales of “artist skins, clothing, [and] a number of different accessories.”

The Why Don’t We scavenger hunt in Roblox, Pro Game Guide

That’s what happens when an artist hosts a concert in game. However, with more direct-to-fan strategies like setting up a Patreon or a Discord artists can open up routes to sell virtual merch items that are not necessarily connected to a live event. Moreover, there are many virtual worlds that integrate virtual merch options. All of this will grow alongside physical merch.

Status as a fandom

The reason merch sales will continue to grow is that fans will continue to seek ways to express themselves. It’s often also a status thing. How often have you walked around in your semi-obscure – probably black – band t-shirt and gotten a shout-out from someone random just because you’re wearing that band’s t-shirt. Of course, this particular example can become commoditized like with Nirvana or The Ramones due to their availability in high-street stores like H&M. Yet, this form of status can be used to more effect by many artists today. It’s not just about the t-shirt, it’s about the status that comes with having that t-shirt from that particular tour or with having the ARMY Bomb. Merch can give a fan a place within a broader fandom. Taking a Status as a Service approach, as popularized by Eugene Wei, artists need to have a twofold strategy to merch in relation to status. Items, whether physical or virtual, should provide social capital and have a high utility.

NFTs and social tokens can be one example where ownership can showcase status and thus provide social capital. These tokens also provide a utility in that they often provide access to certain things like memberships, meet-and-greets, unique tracks, etc. Examples unrelated to blockchain can be fanzines that artists recognize or, to go back to the t-shirt, simply getting a shout-out during a concert for wearing a very specific tour t-shirt. Interestingly, this kind of status-recognition can also come from the artist. Eddie Vedder famously jumped from the stage lights during Pinkpop festival in 1992 wearing a home-made Tivoli – a Dutch venue – t-shirt. In 2001 he wore that same t-shirt again at the same festival and now it’s back on his Funko doll.

pearljamonline.it

Buying-in and showing love

Of course, buying merch is always about showing love to the artist. Besides listening to their music, going to their concerts, your fandom goes one step further and you spend that extra buck to show your support. More and more, and especially during the recent periods of lockdown, buying merch has attained a bigger status as a show of love. It’s also changed how artists sell their merch and what kind of merch they sell. This is especially true of platforms like Bandcamp, where the virtual merch table is automatically integrated during the livestream. What’s more, any buyer gets a mention in the chat allowing the performing artist to give that all important shout-out. That’s not just showing love, but getting the immediate status recognition too.

Again, blockchain-based tokens take this one step further. Not only do they allow the type of investment that will let the fans grow revenues as their beloved artist gains more prominence. More importantly, tokens can provide the privilege of access to the artist. This can be in the form of 3LAU creating a song with the highest bidder of his NFT, but it can also take the shape of a more community-driven solution. In that sense, it’s similar to offering various tiers of access through a Patreon or similar service. The positive extra of a token is that it allows a more reciprocal growth as value can increase over time seperately from the interaction between fan and artist.

Know your audiences, or what do you sell when you sell merch?

The key to understanding these various ways of engaging with merch from the perspective of the fan is to know how to approach those fans as an artist. Not every fan is the same, nor do they want the same. Realising that you have multiple audiences as an artist allows you to strategize accordingly. There’s many ways to do this. One example is terrible*, a company that takes a product management approach to physical merch and helps artists conceptualize, design and deliver products to their fans. In a similar vein, the increasing focus on utility in relation to NFTs shows how artists are thinking about adding value for specific fans. Whether it’s physical or virtual, and whether it’s about status or showing love, what matters is that merch is about more than just selling something. More and more it’s about establishing a connection and doing so with a broad variety of your fan audiences in mind.

Mike Shinoda auction on Zora

NFTs are blockchain’s hottest new use case for music. They should not come as a surprise.

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on NFTs are blockchain’s hottest new use case for music. They should not come as a surprise.

Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda just sold a digital piece of art for $30.000 and took to Twitter explaining some of this thoughts in a thread:

“Even if I upload the full version of the contained song to DSPs worldwide (which I can still do), i would never get even close to $10k, after fees by DSPs, label, marketing, etc.”

The ownership of this piece of art is tracked through a non-fungible token on a blockchain. Blockchains are commonly used as distributed ledgers: databases operated by networks of users, like Ethereum. They keep records of any changes to the ledger and can track things like ownership of tokens or cryptocurrency, e.g. Bitcoin.

But so what if a piece of art is recorded into a distributed database? Why the hype?

The current cultural moment is strongly influenced by the pandemic. Artists saw a big drop in income. Streaming revenue isn’t cutting it for most. So the big experimentation began. Artists searched for revenue through things like livestreaming, fan clubs, ticketed virtual meet & greets, online courses, and NFT auctions…

Why are people buying content that can easily be duplicated?

Many a music industry conference panel has bemoaned the fact that people are willing to buy a cup of coffee or bottle of water, but won’t spend that money on a download and instead chose to pirate it (in the days long before Spotify counted 150M paying subscribers). Two decades later and many of the same philosophical debates about the price and value of music continue. Meanwhile, gaming, an industry that faced the same piracy issues as the music industry, pragmatically pioneered ways to get people to pay for completely virtual items.

Gaming gave the ownership of virtual items a valuable context. People who spent many hours a week inside games would find value in virtual real estate or vanity items that translates into real world currency. This is not something recent. In 2013, someone paid $38,000 for an in-game item in Dota2 – an item which doesn’t improve a player’s performance, but just makes them look cooler. In 2010, virtual real estate by the name of Club Neverdie in online game Entropia sold for $635,000.

Now, ten years later, we’re seeing the same dynamic emerge for music. Owning an NFT doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody else can enjoy the work of art associated with the token, much like with physical art that’s exhibited. With the emerging metaverse, some are expecting NFTs to become its property rights.

NFT x Metaverse

The idea of the metaverse essentially boils down to a virtual shared space. One prominent example of this concept is Roblox, which is a gaming platform in which people can build their own experiences that are all interconnected through Roblox’ economy (its currency being Robux). Another is Fortnite, which has some of the ingredients already, but hasn’t yet developed a marketplace with low barriers to entry like Roblox has. Despite that, one of the best primers on the topic of the metaverse is the below interview with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite.

It’s the convergence of various pandemic-accelerated trends (VR / XR, virtual economies, crypto) and the expectations of people in these domains that is currently driving NFT art’s success stories ($750,000 CryptoPunk sale, Panther Modern‘s $666 sale, virtual critters for $100,000 a piece). If you want to know what the future holds, look at what the smartest people in the room are doing, because they’ll be the ones building that future.

12 years after the initial release of Bitcoin and the world’s introduction to blockchain, crypto is starting to emerge as an anticipated layer of connectivity for transactions occurring in the metaverse. With a market cap higher than Facebook at the time of writing, Bitcoin has made many early adopters very rich (as have other cryptocurrencies). Besides figuring out how to build an infrastructure in which they can effectively use their blockchain-riches, we’re seeing this money flow into other spaces, like art (and soon Tesla).

Simplified: to understand some of NFTs’ success, you should look at the crypto space as a metaverse without an interface that looks like a video game. The participants of that space are still players: they’re building their own world, their own infrastructure. They care about what they look like in that world, just like how people in virtual worlds care enough about their looks that they’re willing to buy in-game currencies like Robux (to the sum of billions of USD in 2020). Owning art is cool – it gives you standing in your micro-community which is part of larger meta-communities (e.g. a gaming clan is a community inside the community of one server of a game, which is a community inside the global player-base of that game).

And sure, there’s altruism too, because it’s cool to support art. However counting on altruism tends to spawn panel discussions to compare bottles of water to digital art. Focus on non-altruistic value.

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

Posted on | 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 â€” 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.

Screenshot of Audius

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.

Party Royale mode in Fortnite

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

Posted on | 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:

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.

Screenshots of Koji

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).

More on Koji.

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.

Voicemod desktop screenshot

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.”

Raph Koster with an Ultima Online shirt

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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