The Vergecast - What does music feel like in the metaverse?

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

The Verge's David Pierce dives into the world of virtual concerts in digital spaces like Roblox and Fortnite. Is this the future of live music? Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and this is the third and last episode of our mini series about the future of music. And for this episode, I want to talk about live music, but not the live music you're probably thinking of. If you want to know what the concert of the future looks like, we have to go back to April 23, 2020. And then we have to go into Fortnite. It's 7 p.m. Eastern, Thursday night,

and the Battle Royale game suddenly turns into this huge concert arena with a big stage right in the middle of the water. There's a round screen above the stage with lots of avatars gathered around it. It looks like a concert. But then, as the music builds right before the show starts, things start to change. There's no musician avatar that appears on the screen,

Instead, this big orb thing with glowing lights and speakers, kind of like you'd mashed all the gear you need to put on a concert into a ball, just starts floating in from the sky. And then a huge, like 100 feet tall, animated Travis Scott appears on stage. He spends the next few minutes stomping all over the island in Fortnite. playing old and new songs. At one point, he lights everything on fire. And then at another point, he takes the whole crowd underwater. It all sounds insane to say out loud, but it was so cool. And then, after about nine minutes, it was over.

You really can't overstate how big a deal that first Travis Scott concert was. More than 12 million people watched that first show, and more than 27 million saw it in one of the five showings over the course of that weekend. Fortnite described it kind of like a concert tour with different dates depending on where you lived. And over the course of that weekend, Fortnite players could also get Travis Scott emotes and gear to play the game with as well. Travis Scott wasn't the first artist to play a concert in a digital space. That's actually been a thing for a long time. I remember back in 2006 when Duran Duran was playing a concert inside a bunch of colored cubes in Second Life,

which now sounds like a very old sentence to say out loud, but it was cool. Scott wasn't even the first to play in Fortnite, but the spectacle of the show and the huge number of fans that showed up and the overwhelming response that it created was a real moment in the music industry. It caused a lot of people to start asking, what does music in the metaverse look like? Oh, actually, a quick point on the word metaverse here. That word, you probably already know, really doesn't mean anything. Meta means it to be like VR digital spaces where no. Nobody has legs, but we all sit in meetings all day, I guess. Some people think about it as what we've seen in books like Snowcrash and Ready Player

1, these super immersive digital worlds we might all live in in the future. But I would argue the metaverse is also Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft and basically any digital place where people hang out together in real time. The tech doesn't matter, really, at least for our purposes. The idea is that it's people being together in digital spaces. That's the metaverse that we care about. So back to the question, what does music look like in the metaverse? One of the people asking that question was Karebe de Gogo Jack, who was then the head of

music business development at Spotify. He's a long-time music industry guy and is permanently looking for new ways for artists to grow and make money. I've been increasingly obsessed with artists, artist success, artist and fan connection and enabling all of that. You know, my role at Interscope Records was about finding more opportunities. for artists to make more money through the label. When I moved over to Spotify, it was a really similar thing.

How can Spotify make more revenue that we can then pass through to musicians? And how can we create emerging artist programs or increasing artist equity programs? And how can we make sure that those are really present in the world? The spoiler ending to Karebe's story is that he's now the head of music partnerships at Roblox, working on bringing more artists and music onto the platform. So you could safely say he bought the whole music. the Metaverse idea. I buy it too, honestly. The Metaverse is this unknown, new, messy thing where nobody knows the rules or how it's supposed to work, but there's something to the live

music thing. It feels big and connective and exciting, and there's clearly something that works for people on an emotional level. Here's how Karee explained it. I recently ran across a concept called reality privilege. Reality privilege, essentially, it means that if you live in an interesting place and you have an interesting cohort of friends. But the truth is that most people don't live in very interesting places with very interesting cohorts of friends, or even if they do, they make real connections in digital spaces. So I think that's a lot of the catalyst and the driver and the appeal of a lot of what's happening across Roblox and platforms like Roblox.

I think from a concert perspective, it's a concert, but it's a concert plus. You get to hear music, but you get to have unicorn wings or something, and you get to climb up on Charlie XX, and you get to share the stage with her. And it's more interesting or more interactive than, you know, a physical environment could be. So it becomes a whole different medium or event in its own way. The most important thing to understand here, I think, is that there's way less distance between a real-life interaction and a digital interaction than there once was. This is one of those things that if you're under like 25, it sounds super obvious, and if you're

over about 40, it sounds totally preposterous. But hanging out in video games, that's hanging out. It counts. It's real. And going to a concert in Roblox and jumping up and down on the virtual stage and meeting the artist's avatar after the show, if that's not all the way as cool and memorable as seeing it in the real world, it's a lot closer than you might think. I really do remember that Travis Scott show as vividly as a lot of IRL concerts I've seen in the past. And like Carribe said, it also

opens up these kinds of experiences to lots of new people. He mentioned one recent event in Roblox, an album listening party with the artist Soccer Mommy, as the kind of thing most people never get to be part of, but that are suddenly available to millions of people all over the world. She gave her fans an opportunity to hang out with her virtually. And, you know, there's a lot of these moments where these fans would geek out and they would type in chat, like, I can't believe that I got to meet soccer mommy. This is the thing about Metaverse music, I think, is so interesting. In the real world, there are only so many ways you can put on a concert or music experience. Big stage, lots of light, a screen. There's cool.

stuff you can do, but the boundaries are pretty clear and pretty aggressive, especially when you have to tear the whole thing down and do it again somewhere else the next day. In digital spaces, you get to kind of start over and rethink the whole idea. But should you? We'll get to that in one second, but first, we're going to take a quick break. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tool, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's shopify.com slash vergecast. Welcome back. When you ask the question, what should a Metaverse concert look like, the most important thing to know is that nobody knows anything. And there's been a lot of experimenting over the last few years. The DJ Marshmallow, who I think actually does get the credit as the first Fortnite concert ever, played a pretty traditional-looking concert. Yo, what is up, Fortnite? What's up, Pleasant Park? My name is Marshmallow. There were some animated dancers on top of the stage, but it was still a stage and some lights and some screens,

though I guess in the audience you could fly it during the concert, so that was definitely new. with me right now. Who's ready to fly? Let's go! Last year, Lil Nas X played a concert in Roblox that was a lot like the Travis Scott show, a big cowboy hat wearing Lil Nas X dancing around lots of different backgrounds. 21 pilots did one that I thought was particularly cool. They had this Choose Your Own Adventure concert and the crowd would vote after each song to decide what they heard next. And this next song is called The Outside. There was also a cool Phoebe Bridgers concert in Minecraft,

where she showed up playing on an old CRT TV while her blocky avatar ran around the virtual stage. All of these, again, sounds sort of ridiculous to hear, but they're fun. They work. They feel like concerts. A couple of weeks ago, the chain smokers did a concert in Roblox that was one of the platform's more epic productions. The schick of the event was that the chain smokers were on a plane, late to a music festival, and all of a sudden the plane flew into a vortex at the Bermuda Triangle. Somehow, this leads to deciding the best idea is just to have a concert on the wing of a plane instead,

which, you know, sure. They played for about 20 minutes, again, also going underwater and through a city and all over the place. The dominant aesthetic of these shows, I would say, is larger-than-life avatars playing in slightly otherworldly places, while dozens or hundreds or thousands of game avatars, bounce and fly around. The bouncing is always my favorite part. It's like one giant mosh pit, everybody just jumping on each other's heads, but without all the bruises and torn clothes. Often, there's also some kind of mini-game you can play during the concert, or some

item to collect, or some related fun thing to do while the music plays. But like I said, this is all still really early. And most of the Metaverse concerts we've seen have been huge, complicated one-off productions. It's like making a massively complicated music video or like a video game every time you want to do anything, which just won't be possible for most artists. So how do you make Metaverse music that scales? That's one thing I talked a lot about with Connell Byrne, the CEO of IHeart Media's digital audio group. Anywhere we can show up as a widely distributed audio company, that is digital. That is my purview. IHeart is this radio giant. They've made some big moves into podcasting and music streaming over the last few years, and recently went

kind of all in on the Metaverse. Connell told me he's convinced that there's something big going on here, but he sees the space a little differently than some others. We don't think actually that at least right now, the event, Travis Scott-type avatar-driven concerts are scalable. I think anyone would agree with that. That's okay, by the way, if it's a one-off. I think it's a little, can be a little confusing to fans on that platform. That's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to build a place that was predictable, natively integrated into the platform you were on, and a place like you felt like was persistent. You could come back every day or once a month. It's up to you trying to land somewhere on that spectrum. Iheart recently opened a concert venue called IHeartland

in both Fortnite and Roblox. They have events planned over the next year, and it actually looks like a concert venue, sort of. In Fortnite, for instance, it's an island, a heart-shaped one, obviously, with a complex of buildings on it. Right in the middle, there's a big stage with a big red State Farm logo on top of it, because the whole thing is sponsored by State Farm. And there's a sort of complex around the stage with four buildings that each have a mini-game inside. There's one called Speed of Sound, one called Leap of Faith. The games all sound and play pretty much exactly like fall guys. There are a bunch of other buildings around that are mostly just for show and

apparently for some parkour game that's coming later. Off to one side, there's a dedicated screenshot area, which is like a red carpet with lots of corporate logos where you can take a picture of your avatar to say that you were there. But obviously, the stage is the thing. Here's how Atlas Creative, the company that developed it for IHeart, described the process in a YouTube video. We started by making a massive frame for the video player that is big enough to be seen across the island. On top of the screen, we sculpted State Farm's logo by kit bashing over 1,000 different shapes together to form the letters. This was a very difficult process, but it turned out amazing. It all sounds very branded, and it is, but so are real-life concerts, so I'll roll with it.

The first concert at I Heartland was Charlie Puth, and it was way less exciting than the Travis Scott show. It happened a couple of weeks ago in Fortnite, and basically all that happened was we stood there and bopped around as a pre-recorded Charlie Puth concert played on the big screen. You can see how this is way more repeatable. It's just a videophile playing on a screen inside of a game. But there are still some unique things about it, as Connell told me, that he thinks make it feel like more than just a video. So first of all, even in that 2D video, Charlie Puth is calling out the Fortnite audience that he is playing to.

Not a big thing, but that's a thing. He's aware of the platform he's on. The second thing is there's a bunch of gameplay leading up to the... the actual concert itself. Trivia with and buy Charlie Puth himself. There is a bunch of mini games that we've built in Iheartland and Fortnite. You'll see the same in Roblox. That players are totally encouraged to break away from the show and go just do that if they want

to. There is a whole commerce of being able to collect and spend currency, soft, IHeart currency, as you see fit. So it's this blend of, okay, I'm here for what is a quote unquote traditional media 2D show, but you've clearly blended this a bunch with the platform that you're on. That thoughtfulness was super important to us. There are two things in there that I heard from a lot of people about music in the Metaverse. One, that it's really important that the artists actually address and seem to understand where they are. It's like the musicians who play a different city every night

yelling, hello, Chicago. And you see this a lot in the Metaverse too, artists saying hey to Roblox or Fortnite or Minecraft. I, Harlan, how are you all feeling tonight? Yo, what is up Fortnite? What's up, Pleasant Park? What's up, Roblox? What's up, Roblox? How are you guys doing today? And two, it's really important that there's more to do than just the concert.

Everybody is starting to develop mini-games and build side quests and give people things to do that feel native to the platform that they're on. One underrated thing about a Metaverse concert, and I know this sounds weird, is that the sound never gets worse. You can run off to play a game or just go wander around for a bit, and it's still going to sound like you're in the perfect position right between the speakers. I heard a lot about skeuomorphism from the people I talk to about Metaverse concerts. Skeuomorphism is basically the idea of taking something new

and recreating an old thing that feels familiar in the new space. Computer desks apps that looked like desks or the old Apple Notes app that looked exactly like a yellow legal pad. That's skeuomorphism. And right now, skeuomorphism isn't actually a bad idea. Many people who come to these concerts are new to the platforms that they're hosted on and often new to the whole concept of the metaphors. So giving them a concert that feels like a concert is a good idea.

And Roblox's Caribbean told me, it kind of helps artists figure out what to do too. But eventually, you get to move on to the bigger, cooler, more platform-native stuff. When you first introduce a concert into these environments, you want the camera on the camera phone to make a shutter sound, even though there's no shutter in the digital camera. You're training people to expect some aspects of what they've seen in real life or what they've experienced in physical world. You're training them to experience that in a digital sphere. But once people become accustomed to what's possible in a Roblox concert, then we can stretch what's possible in a Roblox concert.

You can have it on the wing of a plane or underwater, but there's fire. IHeart's Cunnel Burn was a little more conservative on the subject, but I think feels kind of. the same way. We're trying to land in the middle of that spectrum where it's a 2D video on a large State Farm Park Theater screen, but it's also totally entrenched in all the tropes and memes and gameplay of the platform that you're on as well. One way I've come to think about this moment we're in is like the early days of film. Back then, a lot of movies were just filmed versions of plays, but eventually everyone learned and developed a new vocabulary, how things cut where people go, how cameras move, all that kind of stuff.

And I think we're going to get the same thing here. It'll be a real-life concert in a digital space for a while before we start to figure out what new and better things make sense that never made sense or were even possible before. Maybe it's underwater concerts, maybe it's mini-games that move to the beat of the song, maybe it's something else we haven't even figured out yet. A big part of what's left to figure out

is how to make these things feel more like a community and more interactive. The future of entertainment in general is making the audience feel like they're part of the experience, not just handed a finished product to look at. Some artists are hanging out in digital platforms now, doing live meet and greets through a computer. Others are building permanent places

for fans to just be together and talk to each other. And, oh God, there's merch everywhere. Everyone involved is very excited about all the digital merch they're going to try to sell you. It's coming for you. I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of, things about the Metaverse, and I definitely don't think I want to live my whole life in a digital place. But there is something here, something that feels exciting and immersive and big about

bringing live music to these digital spaces. I'd still rather go see my favorite band's IRL, but you know what? As of two weeks ago, I'd never seen Charlie Puth live. And now I, along with millions of other people, have. And I got to fly around and race cars during the show. Not a bad concert if you ask me. That's it for the Vergecast. Thank you so much for listening. This is the last in our three-episode series about the future of music, and I would love to know what you think of the series. Send us an email at vergecast at theverge.com or hit up the Vergecast hotline at 866 Verge 1-1 and tell us all your thoughts on the future of music. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our

editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or want to meet me for a show in the Metaverse, you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. We'll be back on Wednesday and Friday with all kinds of tech news. See you then. Rock and roll.