tl;dr — Building off our conceptual foundations in part one, this Season 2 report aims to provide the music industry with a diverse set of ideas to monetize music IP and engage meaningfully with fans in the metaverse, across three main categories: Creating visually immersive content, licensing music IP directly to platforms’ content libraries, and making artist IP available for user identity and expression. For each of these high-level opportunities, we detail the specific approaches artists are taking to building out their own metaverse presences both in a top-down and bottom-up manner. We also highlight several key bottlenecks that remain to scaling and streamlining their efforts, and how developers and music-industry professionals can help. All in all, there is a clear mutual incentive at play for more collaboration and co-creation among artists and metaverse platforms, and we hope this report outlines clear action paths to bringing those collaborations to life.

This report is part of our Season 2 research on music in the metaverse, which will be rolling out from July 7 to 15, 2022. You can follow along with the report rollout at stream.waterandmusic.com.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Click directly to jump to a section of your choice.

Intro
Why artists are interested in the metaverse

3 WAYS TO BRING YOUR MUSIC INTO THE METAVERSE

1. Create visually immersive content around your music

A. Top-down approach: Gaming partnerships
B. Bottom-up and decentralized approaches
C. Onboarding, support, and engagement tips for artists and fans

2. License your music directly into worlds and platforms

A. Bespoke licensing deals
B. Direct uploads to platform libraries
C. Accessibility and rights considerations

3. Make your IP available for user identity and expression

A. Visual IP for identity and self-expression
B. Audio IP for social proof, remixing, and derivative works
C. How to execute on visual IP approaches

4. Challenges / opportunities for improvement

A. Show me the data
B. Designing for social stickiness
C. Bridging traditional <> metaverse audiences
D. Technology as a friction point
E. Safety concerns

Conclusion
Contributors

One of our priorities in exploring music in the metaverse for Season 2 was to understand how artists and their teams can use the ecosystem’s tools to drive creative innovation and career growth. Our research led us down multiple paths, illuminating the many avenues available to bring one’s music into the metaverse — whether via a bottom-up, community-led approach (e.g., 200+ shows in Decentraland at The Band Room, weekly parties in Voxels by Lexicon Devils), or one that is more top-down, supported by major labels and gaming platforms (e.g., Travis Scott’s Astronomical show in Fortnite, or Zara Larsson’s album launch party in Roblox).

Where part one of our Season 2 research presented more conceptual design principles for building music/metaverse experiences, this part focuses more on action. Our goal with this report is to provide the music industry with a diverse set of concrete ideas to monetize music IP and engage meaningfully with fans in the metaverse. We begin with some context on broader technology trends and why artists should care about the metaverse in the first place, before jumping into tangible opportunities, techniques, and friction points that arise in the process of trying to incorporate music into metaverse experiences. We also share successful metaverse experiences from artists we interviewed, with the ultimate hope that it proves useful to a wide range of readers including artists, music-industry professionals, virtual world builders, tech investors, and more.

While we sense both excitement and confusion regarding opportunities for music in the metaverse, there are many outstanding challenges and concerns about its future. The metaverse, in the most interactive, scaled, and interoperable sense, remains severely underdeveloped in the kind of content infrastructure and consumer adoption that we have come to expect through more traditional music distribution channels such as streaming services. The pursuit of virtual scale and spectacle at all costs can ironically put fans into a limited or downgraded experience, a far cry from expectations of a full-fidelity recreation of the IRL experience. Good data is also hard to come by in the metaverse, making it difficult for artists and their teams to know which opportunities are the most useful to pursue. Altogether, the metaverse can be a confusing place for musicians with more noise than signal — a problem that we attempt to help with through this article.

Feel free to jump ahead to get straight to the tips, or read on for more historical context.

But wait… WHAT is the Metaverse, anyway?

Depending on whom one talks to, the metaverse can mean many different things. In asking our interviewees for this season how they would define the metaverse, we received a wide range of responses — from “a ‘quasi-religious’ spiritual awakening” at the most open end, to more specific, technical, feature-laden interpretations focused on things like 3D rendering, interoperability, and even a full, “digital twin”-style recreation of the physical world on the other end. As we note in our report on music metaverse design principles, the metaverse suffers from several conflicting narratives competing for attention,such that the first step in providing a believable vision of the metaverse arguably involves accepting that a perfect, static definition does not exist.

So where does this leave us in the context of this article? In deciding which experiences and narratives to consider as part of the metaverse for our research, we kept an open mind and explored broadly, working backwards from the point of usage and practice by artists and music industry professionals. Regardless of where the metaverse goes in the future, our goal was to capture how artists and organizations are using technologies today to create new ways of creating and experiencing music. This article has a laser focus on this usage-first perspective — mapping out music-specific value chains in the metaverse and where artists do and do not slot in easily, and what specific actions artists and their teams can take to either leverage these opportunities or make them more equitable and transparent.

Why should artists consider bringing their work into the metaverse? To sum it up, the concept of the metaverse offers numerous opportunities to further one’s career across multiple revenue streams — from enabling new approaches to creative storytelling (e.g. blurring lines between music and gaming), to supporting new ways of engaging with audiences (e.g. metaverse meet-and-greets), to exploring alternative paths for performance beyond physical touring (e.g. virtual “tours” across multiple metaverse worlds from the comfort of the studio).

Below are four key reasons we’ve identified for artist engagement in the metaverse, drawing on the many interviews we conducted with artists, industry veterans, and tech builders.

New approaches for longform, immersive storytelling

Since the Ancient Greeks integrated music with myth and religion, storytelling in music has gripped people’s attention and imagination. That said, compared to novels, movies, or video games, music as a creative medium faces a unique storytelling challenge due to its relatively shorter running time, lack of visual elements, and typically one-way communication with the audience. To expand the boundaries of music’s narrative space, artists have been looking to create ways to channel trans-media content (across platforms and formats), trans-dimensional characters, and trans-modal experience into music, especially since the arrival of the internet. Gorillaz, one of the pioneers in transmedia storytelling, successfully detailed an affluent and evolving story chronology about several virtual personas by pooling narrative elements in music, videos, games, books, mobile apps, chatbots, and interactive XR experience across decades — a showcase of music’s potential to transport its audience to a different world.

However, such a dedicated and immersive approach seems increasingly hard to come by in today’s music landscape. To quote Marshall McLuhan (as we’ve often done at Water & Music), “the medium is the message”; the media of streaming and short-form videos in particular have changed how listeners consume music, moving away from full-length albums and leaning toward mere seconds-long snippets, which in turn is changing the craft of songwriting itself. As a result, fewer mainstream platforms and formats are available for artists looking to tell stories with details, depth, and lasting power.

The metaverse presents an opportunity for musicians to engage in new forms of artistic creation, through reimagining long-form storytelling and immersive world-building. In the short term, the concept of the metaverse most likely will not replace streaming or short-form videos to fulfill consumers’ ongoing demand for accessible and bite-sized entertainment. However, for artists considering ways to push their story forward and make deeper connections with their most engaging fans over time, the metaverse opens up tremendous potential in the foundations of any story: The setting, the characters, and the plot.

In particular, the metaverse helps to crystallize a vision of next-gen storytelling that can be described as “story-living.” On a fundamental level, “story-living” enables diverse human beings to co-experience their own versions of tales without compromising the story’s integrity, regardless of what visual elements are present. As we discussed in our report on metaverse design principles, the concept of the metaverse empowers story-living by providing the infrastructure for artists and fans to enact collective agency and co-drive narratives in real-time in a dynamic world; it’s the difference between merely witnessing a legend, and being part of the adventure.

Storytelling as the primary motivation to create in the metaverse was highlighted across our interviews. For example, the artist Jagwar Twin and his collaborator Josh Hubberman from the creative agency CTHDRL defined the metaverse by “its ability to better tell stories,” instead of by specific features of its outputs. Their recent project, “Happy Face Experiment” — a music release experience where the audience is asked to hold a smile throughout a video featuring dystopian footage to trigger the new song playing — did not go in a futuristic direction as commonly seen in today’s metaverse scene. Instead, it created a relatable yet intriguingly different world by centering the whole experience around a universal and simple emotional cue, augmenting it with premium design and AI technology. This strategy easily immerses the audience in an alternate reality blending digital and physical, without any 3D visualization or avatars.

New means for connecting with fans

With 60,000 songs uploaded to Spotify everyday, it would be an understatement to say the digital landscape today is saturated. The number of music and social platforms alone compound this problem, and can centralize the power of discovery in the hands of algorithms and closed-door editorial teams. At least for now, gaming and emerging metaverse spaces provide more immersive and interactive opportunities to cut through the noise and connect with fan communities, particularly younger audiences (even if such opportunities may still be gated, as we’ll discuss throughout this piece).

Similar to what music streaming platforms have done over the past decade, games remove geographic barriers to fan engagement, but also add social, interactive, and expressive elements that are not specifically music-focused. While the potential audience is massive (2.8 billion gamers by some estimates), new experiences and spaces for engagement do not need to be large. Our interview with the journalist and researcher Wagner James Au highlighted that metaverses do not necessarily need to scale at all costs, and that the best ones focus on community. All you need is a small group of even just 10 to 20 people who have a clear social or experiential reason to keep going back to the same virtual environment together, building lasting interactions and relationships over time.

For artists that aren’t the world’s biggest pop stars, opportunities to create live metaverse experiences are not out of reach. Over and over again, we spoke with emerging artists who are using the metaverse strategically to cultivate new communities around their work — whether it’s the Lexicon Devils, a crew of artists who promote punk rock shows in Voxels, or Tropix, the self-described “metaverse DJ” who has grown an entirely new fanbase for his work through performing at virtual events across platforms. Self-serve metaverse platforms generally also offer the added advantage of allowing customizable environments for artists and fans to easily control their own experience, constrained only by their own imagination.

New forms of personal and social identity

The metaverse is also a new medium for both artists and their fans to experiment with identity, which we identified in our metaverse principles report as a crucial component of cultivating a sense of presence in virtual environments. The primary mode of engagement in most metaverse platforms is through one’s individual avatar, whose appearance can be customized in a variety of ways, often using in-game or in-world wearables. In addition, metaverse identities are uniquely malleable. Where IRL we only have one body to embody, in the metaverse individuals can create multiple user identities with corresponding avatars. For artists like Panther Modern — who developed two separate avatar identities, a more IRL-leaning “JA” and a techno-heavy “JB,” to better direct his creative outputs through different virtual channels — the power to play with identity is not only a huge creative unlock, but can also be a core part of creative branding, almost like a 3D extension of the time-old “alter ego” concept.

Exploring identity and social connection through one’s virtual avatar can also be deeply therapeutic. Akash Nigam, founder of virtual avatar company Genies, has publicly spoken about how engaging in virtual worlds has helped them to deal with their struggles with depression. It’s worth reproducing a full quote from their interview with Forbes here, owing to how well it represents the feeling of openness provided for many by virtual experiences:

“…when I was behind an app, on a social network, or on the internet, it was much easier to let my guard down, be vulnerable and open, and talk to people. Whether they were people that I knew in the physical world or people I didn’t know in the physical world…I was just able to be more expressive and build deeper relationships because I felt more comfortable without the intimidations of the real world.”

Looking forward, Panther makes a critical point that “these types of [virtual] identity creating experiences are going to be very natural for generations of kids to come. It will become the norm.” As more and more individuals spend time in the metaverse, the ability to define oneself as one wishes will be a huge advantage — allowing for artists to create more complex identities, worlds, and stories around their work, and for audiences to truly be themself as they build relationships and communities. The metaverse also allows artists the opportunity to make their IP available for fans to use while exploring their own identities.

New monetization opportunities

Throughout this report, a commonality among the many different pathways we discuss for artists to bring their music into the metaverse — whether through new licensing deals or virtual wearables — is that they offer new paths for artists to earn income.

The cancellation of live concerts due to COVID lockdowns created new opportunities over the last few years for musicians to perform, both pre-recorded sets and live, in virtual settings. Aside from income alone, a key secondary advantage for some artists is that they become less reliant on a grueling touring schedule to make ends meet — an especially important as live touring remains extremely risky, both with regards to finances and artists’ physical and mental health.

As we’ll discuss shortly below, the revenue opportunity for virtual, immersive music experiences is especially massive for major-label artists, with stars like Lil Nas X and Ariana Grande bringing in tens of millions of viewers for their respective metaverse performances. Though these eye-popping sales figures are out of reach for most artists, we heard from emerging musicians across our interviews that revenues from selling verch (mainly wearables) alongside performances can provide meaningful income, especially in the form of NFTs. Many venue builders in the likes of Voxels and Decentraland will even (re)design their spaces to support these Web3-native commerce opportunities.

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Now that we have an understanding of why an artist might be interested in engaging with the metaverse, we can explore several means to actually enter the landscape and grow one’s metaverse presence as an artist, under the following three high-level categories:

1. Creating visually immersive content around your music — such as producing virtual concerts or immersive album experiences;
2. Licensing your music directly into worlds and platforms — either by integrating music directly into platform content libraries for easy use, and/or through striking direct licensing deals with metaverse worlds; and,
3. Making artist IP available for user identity and expression — including the production of virtual wearables (“verch”), and even making artists’ likeness available to fans in avatar form.

For each of these high-level opportunities, we detail the specific approaches artists are taking to building out their own metaverse presences in a top-down and bottom-up manner including the main bottlenecks that remain to scaling their efforts.

Music is often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to early use cases for new technologies, and the metaverse is no exception: For as long as virtual worlds have been around, its proponents have been trying to put music at center stage. In 1999, David Bowie, early as ever, launched his own 3D world called Bowie World featuring many elements that are in demand in today’s music metaverse experiences, from a live chat element to a custom in-world merch store. In the early to mid-2000s, acts as wide-ranging as Regina Spektor, Talib Kweli, and Ben Foldswere experimenting with album release parties and meet-and-greets in the proto-metaverse game Second Life.

The early COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this decades-old trend as nearly 100% of our interactions went digital seemingly overnight — compelling the likes of Travis Scott, Charli XCX, and Lil Nas X to partner directly with AAA game developers on staging new forms of digital music experiences, ranging from one-off virtual concerts to fully immersive, persistent visual album worlds. The pulls for these celebrities and their teams seem to revolve primarily around the potential to scale one’s brand to an audience of millions — many of whom who otherwise would not be accessible through IRL venues — not to mention the revenue opportunities that come from value-added in-game items like virtual merch (or “verch”). Flagship examples include the 12.3 million people who tuned into the first night of Travis Scott’s Fortnite experience, and the eight figures in verch sales that Lil Nas X is nearing following his Roblox debut.

There are also benefits closer to an artist’s daily challenges of a demanding schedule that seems to ask more of artists when it comes to branding and marketing at scale. Daouda Leonard shared the origin story of his management client Grimes’ energetic move into the metaverse, including the creation of her own digital avatar WarNymph. Daouda would actually say that all the digital assets Grimes had created over the last 10 years were already contributing to her “digital universe,” regardless of whether they were placed explicitly within virtual or 3D environments. The creation of WarNymph expanded on this digital foundation, with a highly utilitarian purpose — namely, not needing to be physically present for every single performance or video creation, instead being able to leverage 3D capture.

That said, these premium, in-game experiences are largely out of reach to the 99% of artists who are simply trying to make ends meet and reach their next 100 fans. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we’re seeing open world-building platformsincreasingly serving as the home bases for digital-native music communities to build new relationships — and, in many cases, literally build their own virtual venues — from the ground up. Some of these platforms, like Decentraland and Voxels, run on Web3-native financial and infrastructural rails, while others like VRChat and Neos do not; the shared throughline across these platforms is the embrace of more cultural and social forms of decentralization, in terms of access to communities and opportunities.

No matter one’s career stage, being early to market as an artist brings cultural cachet. At the celebrity level, artists like Travis Scott and Lil Nas X have attained massive amounts of press coverage and notoriety from their metaverse concert performances. For other smaller artists looking to tap into the user bases of both emerging and established metaverse platforms, their advantage comes from first-mover access to building more tight-knit communities of potential superfans, which present their own follow-on possibilities for generating revenues. In our interview with AmazeVR, for instance, the company told us that their one-off events are a financial windfall for artists — but only to the extent that those artists engage proactively with their superfans, who are more willing to pay more for specific value-added experiences (e.g. physical/digital merch).

Top-down approach: Gaming partnerships

It’s striking, but perhaps not surprising, that the primary entry point for today’s major-label artists to create visually immersive content around their music seems to be the gaming industry. The primary reasons for this close connection between music and gaming at the mainstream level involve ambitions around scale on the one hand, and access to resources on the other.

On the point of scale, market reports predict that the number of gamers worldwide will surpass three billion by 2023. The top individual games and game platforms draw active users in the dozens of millions: Roblox has 54.1 million daily active users as of Q1 2022, Minecraft reported over 141 million monthly active users in October 2021, and Fortnite had 83.3 million monthly active players at its peak in 2021. Importantly, these users are already present and engaged in the games, even without the concerts, and are primed to spend money on ancillary items like wearables.

As we discussed above, the prospect of getting slotted in for a high-profile show in one of these mass-scale environments — meeting millions of gamers where they’re already at, in a format that feels native to them — is exciting for several artists and labels. The flip side, though, is that producing high-quality live experiences within game environments — or what are sometimes called Massive Interactive Live Events (MILEs) — requires a significant investment of both time and money. Bring music into the picture, and you add another layer of complexity when it comes to rights management, especially for environments with no legal precedent when it comes to how licensing deals are structured and monitored.

For both game developers and record labels, it can be risky to operate with this little precedent and infrastructure, such that opportunities to experiment to date at a large scale have been limited mostly to artists who are already at the top of the food chain, with established audiences and marketing resources behind them.

We were fortunate to be able to get an inside look at the complex mechanics behind staging virtual concerts in major games, thanks to the expertise of some W&M members such as veteran music, tech, and gaming journalists Mat Ombler and Declan McGlynn, as well as background interviews with some industry pros and licensing experts.

Resources and personnel

For example, let’s examine Zara Larsson’s launch party in Roblox, which took place in May 2021. In general, Larsson fits the kind of celebrity profile that Roblox is looking to attract for its marketing and product-development needs — namely, an artist with broad, global demographic appeal who can help Roblox “age up” the platform’s user base as a whole as it goes more mainstream. (The platform’s users still skew young, with over half of US kids 16 and under playing as of late 2020.)

At a high level, Larsson staged a virtual concert and Q&A with fans in a bespoke world within Roblox, with adjacent verch for sale and quests and games for attendees to play — ranging from a Swedish lake house to a huge hangout area with activities including trivia, speed-boating, a scavenger hunt, and more. Below the surface, a huge amount of human and financial capital was put to work. The complexity often lies in the simple but crucial operational questions:

1. Which stakeholder is responsible for creating, supplying and marketing which parts of the experience;
2. Who will get approval over which assets; and
3. Where (if at all) these assets will be sold and monetized, and how revenue will be split.

Oftentimes, Roblox’s internal developer team will lead the engineering for these experiences, with the gaming company also providing a designated marketing team, project managers, and partnership/licensing specialists. The exact team setup is custom to each show; sometimes a third party or even a label-led team will get involved in development, depending on each stakeholder’s bandwidth and budget at the time. Some artists may opt for a lifelike avatar or a third, more resource-intensive option of motion capture (e.g. Lil Nas X). Importantly, whoever is footing the bill will often retain control and rights of the world that is created.

Rights and metrics (or lack thereof)

Securing music rights in the metaverse takes expertise. Consider how even the basic premise of a pre-recorded DJ set would require some master recordings and samples to be cleared on both the recorded music and publishing side, which means coordinating licensing deals with artists, writers, labels, and publishers. Public performance licenses from PROs are also required. On top of all this, there are platform restrictions on language and lyrical content that also have to be taken into consideration. It’s not uncommon for artists to slip up and curse – a thrill for kids, no doubt.

As for who exactly is responsible for obtaining the necessary copyright clearances and public performance licenses — the platform as a whole, the specific world within the platform, the host of the event, etc. — there are no standards yet. And of course, questions abound on the monetization side, which need to be resolved through a complex web of contracts between rights holders and Roblox, between rights holders and artists, and between Roblox and out-of-house developers (if necessary), among other parties.

You would think that licensing and revenue-share deals between rights holders and gaming companies like Roblox would take detailed metrics around usage and engagement into account. And yet, in our interviews with both indie and major-label professionals working directly with these experiences, we were surprised to hear about the lack of clear metrics and data tracking that artists and rights holders receive for Roblox events at large.

Some high-level metrics that rights holders use to determine the success of a given project include:

• Total viewers
• Money made (and from which items)
• Off-platform streams that occur
• Social media follower growth and sentiment
• Net new fans acquired
• Retention
• Return viewers (for async content)

However, all monitoring is carried out through Roblox’s internal systems (including a DevEx account with a dashboard for clients), and timestamped data tracking is not robust while in-game. While the moment of peak concurrent viewers is easily identifiable, there is not a lot of data given to rights holders on who is buying what and when.

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Bottom-up and decentralized approaches

Open virtual worlds

How music fits into the value proposition of gaming platforms like Roblox and Fornite is very different from how it fits into the value propositions of more open platforms such as Second Life, VRChat, Decentraland, and Voxels where we are seeing passionate music communities forming from the ground up. The best-known artists in these latter worlds tend to be those who have been around the longest and have first-mover advantage, but also have credibility in the eyes of their peers due to their ample time and effort spent helping to grow the ecosystem. Overall, there seems to be a bucking of traditional, individualistic celebrity culture — with less bonding over specific artists, and more focus on the shared mission of upending the incumbent music industry that otherwise leaves many artists on the proverbial curb.

We spoke to some of the pioneers in these worlds to get a sense of why they have chosen these spaces to build their communities, and what keeps them and their peers coming back even as the IRL world opens. A popular entry point seems to be building one’s own venues in these decentralized worlds, or seeking out other venues to play in, many of which are quite accessible and open to showcasing emerging acts. There is a lot of room to carve out one’s own unique approach.

Vandal — founder of DAOrecords and host of the super early virtual concert series The Pop Up and more recently Sound Splash — explained that they “didn’t necessarily care about the aesthetics” of the world; it was “more about the community… meeting people, coming together, sharing the chat, and doing it live.” Vandal, who has looked at building many venues across multiple worlds, found Voxels to be the easiest and most accessible world to build in.

The Band Room is another nascent virtual venue in Decentraland owned by The Rocking Uniquehorns, an NFT project. The venue was initially an ancillary benefit for NFT holders, but quickly became the most active part of the community operation as a whole. Shelley VanWitzenburg runs the venue, which has hosted over 200 shows in the last 180 days. They have never said no to an artist. Shelley was adamant about the venue’s inclusive philosophy in our interview: “I am absolutely not here to gatekeep — everyone gets a chance if they want to perform.”

We also spoke with long-time metaverse MC, host, and community builder EZ, who has hosted a virtual Discord event series known as WIP (for “Works in Progress”) for over two years now. Each WIP event features three builders who discuss their projects; EZ shared that oftentimes they try to have the last builder be someone who has an actual build in one of the many possible worlds that the group can go explore afterwards. “The people, their passion and the content that they’re producing” is what keeps EZ coming back day after day, in his words. EZ is also a longtime contributor to MVMF (Metaverse Music Festival, founded by W&M member Natalie La Crue), which ran over three days in October 2021 and drew thousands of people, and is now a continuing event series taking place across metaverse worlds.

When discussing the more Web3-native music metaverse community as a whole, EZ explained that while it is “still fairly nascent — a small group of [NFT] collectors, not millions of people — this actually provides a lot of freedom to explore.” Each builder we interviewed for this season shared some metrics with us to help contextualize the current scale of their community: Vandal collaborated with CoinGecko on a 600-person event, Shelley has seen 1,000 people join a show in The Band Room, MVMF drew thousands of people over their three-day festival, and WIP consistently sees 150 to 300 people show up every week.

Last but not least, we spoke with Tropix, an artist and self-proclaimed “Metaverse DJ” who has performed sets across multiple environments, including Discord, Decentraland (DCL), The Sandbox, oncyber, and Worldwide Webb. Interestingly, Tropix’s point of entry was not the virtual spaces themselves, but rather the adjacent communities around them, who would often use non-3D platforms like Discord to keep in touch and coordinate events. The COVID pandemic had forced him to learn how to DJ over Twitch and route his fans over to Discord, even before NFT hype raised Discord awareness beyond the gaming community. After DJing a party during NFT NYC 2021, he realized that “lots of Web3 stuff was happening, but no one was there to bring them all together and celebrate.”  Thus he began reaching out to NFT Discords and offering to DJ for their communities.

Six months later, Tropix has DJed over 60 virtual events, as well as landed coveted IRL activations at SXSW 2022. The Average Punks community even built him their own DCL metaverse, while SandStorm built him a bespoke Sandbox Arena. Keeping in line with what we learned about the Roblox builds, these spaces are all owned by their builders moving forward. Moreover, Tropix went from the DJ grind in his early years of having to sell tickets — essentially a workaround pay-to-play system that clubs employ — “to getting paid 3-4x more than getting paid in real life to do a digital gig, without having to promote or sell tickets.”

Bottom-up virtual world monetization and metrics

As for monetization at large, the revenue opportunities available in these decentralized worlds are quite diverse — NFTs, wearables, ads, real estate — but, miraculously, there are no tickets. On the artist side, the most common form of monetization we saw in these worlds was NFT sales. For instance, The Band Room allows artists to project their art on the screen surrounding their stream, with clickthrough ability to NFT marketplaces. Similar to how we heard in our previous Web3 research that speaking in a Twitter space might lead to a sale, many hosts reported sales occurring during the concert. Wearables (parallel to verch in Roblox and Fortnite) were the next most common offering. For instance, Vandal even designs branded Soundsplash wearables for artists to don when they are first entering the venue, so they have some flair off the bat.

On the venue side, though, Shelley of the TRU Band room put it very bluntly to us: “The project isn’t making money. They [the founders of The Rocking Uniquehorns] are bankrolling it for now, because they love it & want to see musicians take control of their art.” However, The Band Room does have some revenue coming in through dynamic ads on the walls of the venue, which they are working on with Web3 ad company Versadex to execute. Shelley is conscious of making sure ads are “cohesive” and relevant so as not to take away from the experience. Another revenue stream is through “Band Room Takeovers,” which can be simple space takeovers or a full rebuild of the venue for a third-party event (i.e. for a festival or something similar). While these rebuild projects are priced at a much higher premium, they also involve a much more intense workload and are difficult to scale, speaking to the enduring challenge of building an industry ecosystem that is financially sustainable for the multiple stakeholders that make it happen — a problem that certainly feels familiar to the traditional music business.

Both Shelley and Vandal relied on the metrics that their platforms provide to parcel owners – essentially just the number of visitors. There are some new avenues for metrics coming from ads, such as impressions, as well as aggregated metaverse analytics platforms like WeMeta. But these tools still tend to focus on the financial value of parcels and not on actual user engagement or consumption of in-world media or experiences. Moreover, we found at least in our interviews that virtual-world venue owners are not particularly metrics-focused in the first place. This was something that was shared by Josh Hubberman from CTHDRL and Jagwar Twin when evaluating the browser-based experiences they had been releasing. After explaining to us that their team was more concerned with story and creativity, he joked, “can you tell we like soft metrics?”

Creative and collaborative tools

Outside of these decentralized venues, many tools are emerging that enable artists to create their own immersive and collaborative experiences without the need for advanced technical knowledge.

For instance, Endlesss, founded by the electronic musician Tim Exile, presents a straightforward UI allowing artists to “jam” together, layering ideas over top of each in real-time. Through this simple structure, Endlesss intends to make “the process the product,” with users returning for the collaborative relationships and community produced on the platform, as well as the musical outputs (and resulting revenues) that stem from being there. Similarly, ToneStone is building more accessible creative tools that, in the words of founder Greg LoPiccolo, “compel exploration.” They are particularly interested in collaborations between artists and fans, where artists can push their creative intent into interactive creation with their audience (as well as between fans and each other), in the same vein as TikTok Duets. While these examples might not include 3D design elements as the focal part of the product per se, they could potentially lay the foundation for more social, interactive, multidirectional experiences that ultimately will drive the most engagement in metaverse experiences.

There also exists an entire class of emerging platforms trying to create no-code tools for artists to build worlds around their music, across multiple mixed realities. For instance, Volta XR — whose stated mission is to “democratize mixed reality creation,” and who counts deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin among their investors — is developing free tools for artists to produce captivating, audio reactive visuals for their metaverse performances. The core functionality lies in creating audio-reactive 3D assets and shapes that can be wrapped in live video (or vice versa); for instance, imagine a silhouette of you dancing to your favorite song, but overlaid with a thousand stars or balls of light that are moving in time with the music. There are also direct integrations with DJing and production tools like Ableton and Traktor, enabling artists to integrate the tool more seamlessly into their respective workflows. While there is still a learning curve, creating assets of this quality from such an accessible and ultimately learnable program would have been unheard of even five years ago.

In the virtual-world sphere, we demoed platforms including a.live and Controlla that more explicitly put music creation and experience in 3D virtual space. For instance, in a.live, we mounted a hoverboard in space and flew our avatar through an entire planetary zone designed around the song “Is It You?” by Huyana. Throughout the ecosystem, we were able to experience song-related content, including a behind-the-scenes video of Huyana speaking about the song — a feature that platform founder Abhijit Nath described as a form of virtual liner notes. In Controlla, our rocket-shaped avatar also traversed outer space (yes, space is a recurring theme in the metaverse) — with the twist that by engaging the gyroscope on our phone, the platform allowed us to live-remix songs, with audio parameters like reverb or distortion mapped to the direction one tilts their phone. The possibilities for artists to use these types of platforms creatively to augment existing activities like album marketing campaigns are numerous — whether creating an entire immersive solar system around an album like in a.live, or through offering a no-hassle process for creating a fully interactive, user-remixable version of a single. All an artist needs to do is sign up, upload a song along with individual stem files, and enjoy outer space.

Creative services and consultancies

Still, with all the tools available (and there are many we didn’t cover above), not every artist will have the time or desire to be designing worlds. Even multi-hyphenate artist and world-builder Panther Modern questioned in our interview: “At this moment, can we expect recording artists to also be world developers and virtual designers?” It can be especially difficult for artists to maintain a constant presence in multiplayer experiences, which otherwise are a key element for sociability and platform stickiness in the metaverse — a tension paralleled in our previous Web3 research about the heavy lift of looking after large virtual communities.

As a result of these resource challenges, there is an emerging service industry of virtual world builders and event designers popping up around the metaverse — especially in Web3-native communities, where there is a double whammy of needing to master the complexities of blockchain technology and virtual worlds in one swoop. Lexicon Devils are one such group of builders who are currently for hire. Initially a group of artists experimenting in Voxels by doing events, producing builds, and buying and flipping parcels, they now operate as the unofficial “metaverse arm” of decentralized funding platform Juicebox. They are full-service, focusing on experience design, modeling, hosting, and planning for three events per month on the Juicebox parcel in Voxels. There are plenty of groups out there working on galleries and looking for corporate gigs to pay the bills, but Lexicon Devils are unique in their focus on music — an ability it maintains owing to its partnerhsip with JB and profit shares from buying and selling parcel tokens.

Bittrees is another metaverse services organization that operates similarly to Lexicon Devils – a group of artists who realized that there was an opportunity to learn about and create community in the metaverse by building parts of it themselves. Their primary business is helping clients to build on parcels in decentralized metaverse platforms and launch NFT projects; however they also see a complementary role as community builders around art and music in the metaverse. They’re deeply involved with hosting and promoting music events in the metaverse, including supporting the Metaverse Music Fest (MVMF), an event series that takes place in virtual venues across multiple platforms and spotlights emerging artists. Their co-founder Ian Prebo explained to us how their approach is designed to foster connections between people – including artists and fans – with a community first ethos being a “more authentic and engaging” way of building, and also fitting their ethical values as an organization.

As the music metaverse continues to develop, we foresee a growing need for service providers — including licensing experts, UI designers, and booking agents, not just venue builders or promoters — to help artists and their teams navigate their way into the ecosystem. Like the traditional music industry, it will take a village for artists to stand out amongst the increasing competition in the metaverse.

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Onboarding, support, and engagement tips for artists and fans

Artist and fan onboarding

For a successful musical metaverse experience, both artists and audience need to have at least a basic understanding of how the platform they are using works, whether it’s the basics of how to login and get audio working (a common challenge), or more advanced  functions like how to make one’s avatar boogie on the virtual dance floor. Both Vandal and Shelley VanWitzenburg described standardized onboarding processes and documentation for artists that cover not only the technical aspects of streaming (almost all venues were either using OBS and/or streaming through Twitch/Youtube), but also behaviors and mechanics in the virtual world itself, covering how to move, communicate, or even fly in some cases.

For Vandal, “showing by example is the easiest way.” He always makes a point to bring artists to a performance as a listener first as part of the onboarding process. Shelley suggests a minimum of two hours to troubleshoot prior to a show, and does an enormous amount of 1:1 time with artists.

On the fan experience side, Vandal emphasized that he “needs eyes and ears” on the ground to ensure that a given stream and sound are running well, and to help attendees with any troubleshooting that might surface. Similar to Tropix, he has folks monitoring social media not only to post live content, but also to push folks who might be watching on other platforms like Twitch directly into the Voxels world. Someone is always taking snapshots or screen-recording the show, which is analogous to having a photographer and videographer in an IRL concert. Pirate streaming is another consideration for the social media monitor; ifsomeone in the space is also broadcasting through Twitter Live or IG Live, it essentially serves as a restream that creates another, perhaps more accessible view for new attendees.

Both EZ and Vandal raised a flag around the differences between mobile and browser access. EZ’s WIP community meets primarily on Discord, with the follow-on option to explore a virtual world after the main meeting. The reasons for this are multiple; apart from general network or bandwidth issues, not everyone might be able to access the virtual space in the first place due to a lack of cross-device compatibility. For instance, the world might be browser-only, such that mobile-first folks won’t have access. Even once everyone is in-world, there are also often differences in the mechanics and features available across devices. In Voxels, for example, voice chat is only available through browsers, and even then the text chat is easier to access. At large, it’s important to be prepared for both types of users, browser-based or mobile. Check the specs and requirements for any metaverse world you are planning to perform in and educate your audience beforehand to avoid an excess of show-time DMs from potential audience members struggling to access and enjoy the show.

Cross-device setup, multitasking, and engagement

Among the artists and promoters we spoke with, one of the recurring themes we heard is that streaming a performance into a virtual space is both technically and logistically challenging. For one, because streaming is often done through OBS via Twitch or YouTube, an artist is not able to see the audience by default unless they also log into the virtual world as a user separately. Trying to run OBS or Twitch while also running Voxels or Decentraland on the same computer is incredibly taxing resource-wise, and could result in issues with the stream. Owing to this challenge, Vandal, Shelley VanWitzenburg, and Tropix all emphasized the enormous benefit to artists of running two different computers simultaneously when performing in the metaverse — one computer to stream audio, and another to actually be present in the world.

With an advanced show like Tropix’s DJ sets, for instance, there is also a shocking amount of multitasking required. His metaverse DJ equipment stack includes a double monitor — one facing forward to see the stream, and another facing to the right that shows Twitter and Discord activity plus response activity around a POAP form for select Web3-native events. He needs to use an RX2 controller to DJ rather than his own laptop, so that he is not simultaneously running DJ software that might eat up crucial computer bandwidth to support the livestream. While DJing, he interacts with the community across both platforms on chat and voice — not to mention managing multiple camera angles on his video stream. “With a video show, it’s pretty tough to do all of this stuff while DJing, because it ruins the visual of the DJ,” Tropix told us. To deal with this multitasking, Tropix recommends that artists engaging in metaverse performances use Streamlabs OBS to stream pre-created videos or clips — a.k.a. “scenes” — that allow them to spend a moment engaging and responding in real-time to the audience via social media without appearing on-stream as disengaged from the performance (e.g. video content giving more context around the project, or encouraging live audiences to retweet promo material around the show).

As for engaging audiences during a show, an artist might activate attendees to do selfies (both in-world via avatars and IRL via phone or computer cameras), post on Twitter, sign the venue guestbook, or submit their wallet info for the chance to win a POAP or NFT. In a Web3 context, it’s also not uncommon for there to be bounties for attendees, such as Vandal’s “token bounties for event attendees who join and sign the guestbook in-world.”

Engaging in real-time with the audience is also essential to keeping fans involved in a virtual performance. Interactivity is the name of the game for metaverse audiences — who, unlike those who attend IRL concerts, can just as easily surf on to the next web-based experience when they feel disengaged. Tropix often makes a point to call people out by their name to show that he is watching. This makes others want to stay and get a shoutout and combats short attention spans.

Since most communication in virtual worlds is still undertaken via chat (voice is still a bit janky in many of these worlds, especially at scale), it’s important for teams to take turns in chat. Other engagement strategies includeprompting fans to emote, dance, throw up a fire emoji, create conversation, and most importantly, thank people. It bears repeating that building community is a key unlock for artists moving into the metaverse, and being gracious with an audience can go a long way. The chat is also where troubleshooting will often surface. We noticed that Shelley was constantly monitoring the chat for issues and even messaging off-platform in Discord to check in with W&M members during our own community exploration of The Band Room.
Vandal reminded us of one final essential point for maintaining audience engagement —  that it’s “always good to freshen it up and not be too repetitive.” Just like at IRL concerts, when an artist is having fun and being themselves on stage in the metaverse, the audience is also much more likely to have fun and stay engaged.

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Establishing a presence in the metaverse via creating or participating in immersive virtual experiences is an appealing prospect with multiple opportunities available for artists, both established and emerging. But as we’ve discussed, regardless of approach, producing a detailed, immersive experience requires a significant investment of resources.

For those without major game development experience or resources, perhaps a more straightforward route to bringing music into the metaverse is through getting one’s music placed directly in virtual worlds’ content libraries, or otherwise licensed for use in the metaverse. This approach is attractive because it allows for artists to benefit directly from the bread-and-butter of their craft — namely, their music itself. The fruits of direct-upload and licensing opportunities can also scale more easily as the metaverse continues to grow in terms of the number of platforms and audience members available. Licensing and monetizing music for use in virtual worlds in particular has an added advantage above that of traditional sync licensing of music works for television and film: In metaverse platforms, users are not simply passive viewers, as in TV and film, but are themselves content creators who require music for the experiences they are building. This expands the potential user base for licensing and using music in the metaverse beyond metaverse companies and brand partners, to the entire population of users who are contributing to and growing these worlds.

Mike Darlington, co-founder of the digital-focused, independent label Monstercat, told us in an interview that when they work on specific licensing opportunities, they ensure that clearance for use in user-generated content (UGC) both on and off platform for twitch or youtube streaming is included. The goal is to avoid putting limits on the proliferation of the music and avoid takedown notices for content creators. To generalize this as-yet highly specific approach, imagine that instead of negotiating a song to be in one video game, an artist was able to negotiate their song to be available for use across thousands of video games and hundreds of millions of users. This is becoming the dynamic both at mainstream gaming platforms like Roblox — whose worlds-within-worlds platform architecture has birthed over 40 million games as of January 2022 — and at emerging platforms such as Decentraland and Voxels that also have their own marketplaces. Epic Games’ controversial acquisition of Bandcamp in March 2022 also points to a potential future of independent artists’ music being licensable not just across Epic’s flagship games, but also across any game that uses the Epic-owned 3D design tool Unreal Engine (which already has its own music assets marketplace). As the decade continues with UGC as the prime ingredient of many successful platforms, many industry professionals and creators we spoke with see the potential of metaverse content libraries and licensing steadily increasing alongside mainstream end user adoption.

Bespoke licensing deals with metaverse platforms

One method for bringing music IP into the metaverse is through negotiating placements and blanket licensing deals at the platform level. This path is most accessible for established labels and publishers, who have the market positioning and/or direct relationships to gain access to licensing opportunities with platforms at the mainstream, mass-scale level. Unlike individual artists, labels (both indie and major) have the benefit of being able to offer a wide range of catalog to platforms at once, reducing transaction and administrative costs and de-risking the often complex licensing process for metaverse platforms. As we’ll discuss further below, this value proposition is very appealing to platforms amidst a treacherous and complex rights system, such that it remains incredibly difficult for solo independent artists to find their way into the ecosystem through licensing alone.

Monstercat provides a good example of what the licensing process could look like for labels. In 2011, when the game streaming ecosystem first began to take off on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, streamers were constantly running into issues with takedown notices for having uncleared songs in their videos. Monstercat saw the opportunity to provide value to the streamer community by delivering fully-cleared, “festival-quality” music to gamers and platforms directly from their own catalog. Over 10 years later, Monstercat still holds weekly calls with some of their gaming partners, and has placed songs across the world’s biggest games and virtual stages, including Rocket League and Roblox. Monstercat Gold, a low-cost subscription platform where content creators (not companies) can “allowlist” their channel and avoid DMCA notifications for their music, is another example of Monstercat attempting to reduce friction for the music licensing process.

Another great example of an artist/game partnership is electronic producer Zedd’s pandemic-era collaboration with his favorite video game Valorant. In this case, the collaboration tied together music and avatar customization, a licensing partnership truly unique to the virtual world. Zedd and Valorant worked together to design a weapon skin-pack that includes sounds written by the artist (making each weapon distinctive), as well as composed music that plays while each weapon is being inspected. Importantly, we were made aware of this collaboration in our interviews with gamers under 18, who noted that they followed Zedd on Spotify after the weapon pack release.

Direct uploads to platform libraries

A second method for artists to directly bring their music into the metaverse is to upload songs to platform libraries for use by developers and content creators to produce in-world experiences. That said, UGC can be a copyright nightmare, and many of the major metaverse platforms are understandably moving carefully in the realm of user-uploaded music as a way to limit legal risk and avoid an onslaught of copyright claims and takedown requests from rights holders.

As an example, let’s take a look at how Roblox enables user-uploaded music on their platform. Roblox positions their Creator Marketplace (formerly known as the Library) to builders as “a collection of freely available models, decals, audio, videos, meshes, and plugins that you can use to help create the experience of your dreams!” As of March 22, 2022, the Roblox audio content library consists of licensed audio from Monstercat (independent record label), APM (Sony and Universal Publishing-owned library music), Nettwerk Music Group, Pro Sound Effects, Position Music, and any user audio previously uploaded that is shorter than six seconds.

And… that is it. Critically, thanks to the fallout of a $200 million copyright lawsuit settled in September 2021 with the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), there is no path for users to upload new audio to Roblox’s Creator Marketplace today. All audio longer than six seconds that was uploaded before March 22, 2022 is now set to private and only available to the uploader for use. That means if a wildly popular game was using your music that you uploaded previously, your song would no longer trigger in that game, and you do not have the ability to approve the use (yet). Confirming Roblox’s official statement and user guide for how to deal with the changes, Roblox employee Morgan T. explained on an online forum: “The ability to set audio to public will be temporarily paused while other solutions are being looked into. We do not have an estimate for when we will re-enable the ability for you to change an asset from private to public.”

This is a major growing pain for a company that, like countless others, moved fast and broke a lot of things when it came to music rights. The situation is very nuanced, as there was rampant fraud occurring before the lawsuit, and change was, at least legally speaking, needed. Nonetheless, these changes mean that if you are an artist who wants to distribute your music into the Roblox Creator Marketplace, but are not represented by one of the five music groups listed above, you’ll just have to wait. We dive deeper into the lawsuit details later in this piece, but first want to highlight the second-order effect for the music industry: the lack of access and opportunity for independent musicians to monetize and have their music proliferated and discovered in this staggeringly populous and engaged world.

One important exception is that users can still upload their own music for use in their own creations. In theory, an artist could create a game in Roblox that relies on their own music, but this really only gives them access to whomever they can convince to play their game, rather than the entire Roblox user base. Restricting access to the Creator Marketplace arguably puts independent creators at a significant disadvantage, leaving them unable to take advantage of the huge audience of developers and user creators looking for music to pair with their content in Roblox.

The Boombox is another Roblox feature worth discussing. Launched in 2016, Boombox allows users to play any Roblox sound file so that “everyone else nearby can hear it!” Users have to first upload the song to their Roblox Creator Marketplace and then, using an ID Code, can trigger the song in a game. Currently, there are endless dedicated lists curating these ID Codes. The uncertainty that ensued from the NMPA lawsuit is clear in this quote from Roblox’s curation site: “The Roblox Music codes that we have mentioned here were 100% working at the time of updating this post. If you want to get your hands on the latest Roblox Music codes then I highly recommend bookmarking this page because we will update this list when new Boombox codes are released.” The list seems to skew heavily towards major-label artists such as Doja Cat and Imagine Dragons, who have their own dedicated pages linked. This left us wondering how these songs remain on the platform at all, given its restrictive copyright environment. (It also left us speculating on whether there will be a Roblox-native version of T-Pain’s success.)

Another incumbent metaverse company, Epic Games, looks to be executing a different strategy towards music use on their platforms with their recent acquisition of Bandcamp. Some of our interview subjects and community members speculated this acquisition could create opportunities for Bandcamp artists to more easily have their music placed in Fortnite and other Epic metaverse properties, which is an exciting prospect in the context of how limited such opportunities are for independent artists.

Currently, all of the sounds in Fortnite’s Creative Mode are uploaded by or created within the platform itself. There are, for instance, certain games within Fortnite where you can compose music using music tiles, but the process is incredibly cumbersome, and you have to make do with the relatively few sounds you can find (see, for example, this heroic effort by creator Levi Niha to make a rudimentary beat in Creator Mode over several hours).

During gameplay, Fortnite users can also listen to in-game radio stations like Radio Yonder, which, unsurprisingly, is an entire station dedicated to a collaboration with Monstercat. Other stations including Powerplay, Beatbox, Rock & Royale, Radio Underground, and Icon Radio offer up other alternatives with artists ranging from Japanese Breakfast to Brockhampton to Bruno Mars, plus some internally produced music from Epic Games. The point is that the sources of music, and means to contribute one’s own music to Fortnite, are very restricted to those who have access to label deals or direct platform relationships, leaving many independent artists at a loss of how to even think about leveraging the potential of being featured in the game.

This brings us to opportunities for music in more open, decentralized metaverse platforms like Decentraland and Voxels. These worlds have all sought to avoid taking on the costs associated with policing and administrating music copyright themselves, by instead offloading that responsibility to third-party streaming or content providers. In these worlds, users bring music onto the platform from external providers, most often Twitch or YouTube (often via OBS).

For these metaverse platforms, the assumption is that, if a song makes it past the copyright monitoring and protections on established services like YouTube or Twitch without receiving a takedown notice, then it should meet the copyright requirements to be played freely in the metaverse. To be clear, this approach is a way for these platforms to punt on having to deal with licensing. And while it may work in the short term, these platforms will ultimately need to consider a more formal, in-house approach to on-platform music and copyright if they continue to grow and scale up users. (There are some signs of structural change, though, with music licensing marketplaces like Lickd starting to experiment with direct deals with decentralized metaverse platforms). Most importantly, it means that artists on these platforms have limited means to directly access new licensing opportunities on the platforms themselves. They can, of course, continue to monetize via the video streaming platforms they are using to beam music into the metaverse like Youtube, but this does not provide a new, additional form of revenue.

We asked Mike Darlington and Gavin Johnson if they had any advice for artists looking for licensing opportunities. They emphasized finding games where there is clear brand alignment first and foremost, with a major plus if the artists are genuinely embedded in the communities themselves. For instance, producer duo SMLE are dedicated gamers and Twitch streamers who recently teamed up with vocalist Athena to produce the Rocket League London Spring Major Anthem. Another example is Japanese rockstar MIYAVI – an avid player of Riot Games’ Valorant with his daughters – who was recently featured on the Riot Game’s Arcane Legends soundtrack.

Accessibility and rights considerations

The friction caused by the traditional copyright system has curbed the proliferation of mainstream and independent recorded music broadly, the metaverse included. The reality of having two copyrights associated with music – the sound recording and the composition, also known as the master and the publishing – exponentially increases the number of people that need to be in the chain of clearance for a song. Oftentimes vocalists, producers, and labels will hold a song’s master rights, while all the writers, which may or may not be affiliated with their own publishers, hold the composition rights. And for virtual worlds, there is a third right that needs to be accounted for, namely the right to public performance often held by the respective Performing Rights Organization (PRO). You can see how the web becomes tangled very fast.

In our interview with licensing and sample clearance expert Deborah Mannis-Gardner, she gave some advice to platforms on how soon they should start thinking about licensing music into the metaverse, “Have a logo? Get a PRO license.” She went on further to say that PROs need to make it easier for companies to acquire licenses for metaverse-based music use: “There should be a box you can check.” Mannis-Gardner and her colleague, copyright lawyer and expert Stacey Haber, have convened an informal group of industry experts called the Web3 Music Consortium, to map out the many challenges with licensing music for use in metaverse and Web3 applications. Their ultimate goal is to develop a suite of solutions to licensing issues, including with PROs and CMOs to produce standardized routes and processes for moving music into the digital realms. (This mirrors efforts that some labels like Warner Music Group have taken to make their music licensing processes more streamlined and standardized for startups that are otherwise strapped for cash.)

Likewise, many private businesses are working to solve licensing problems for metaverse environments, with the hope that they can benefit in the long term from making the process easier for creators. The companies BMAT and Audible Magic have teamed up to build a turnkey solution that handles music ingestion, tracking, reporting, and payment for digital service providers, which includes metaverse platforms. The current infrastructure is severely underdeveloped and each platform is expected to build its own rails; as BMAT’s Regional Manager, North America Dani Balcells put it, “imagine if every restaurant had to build its own oven.” Not install, but build it piece by piece. Through working directly with rights holders and administrators like PROs and CMOs, this project hopes to “build the oven” for artists and creators, making it a simple and painless process to license and get paid from use of their work in the metaverse.

Daouda Leonard of CreateSafe is another individual building infrastructure with the hopes of dramatically altering the current music-to-metaverse pipeline in favor of independent and emerging artists. CreateSafe is working on rails that will allow artists to upload to metaverse platforms such as Roblox Creator Studio, Decentraland, and Voxels marketplaces at the same time as serving music to DSPs such as Spotify and Apple music. The initial rollout will be closed with curated artists, but the vision is for all independent artists to eventually have that same level of access.

Another nascent approach for dealing with these problems comes from the world of blockchain and Web3. Dequency is an example of a startup that has begun exploring the potential to embed music rights and licenses within NFTs as a way of simplifying licensing processes across virtual environments. The plan is for end users of music to be able to simply purchase an NFT for a song that acts as a license and includes all of the song’s usage terms and rights. Where this approach is especially innovative is in how it gives independent creators more power in licensing, with artists themselves having more leverage to understand and set the terms around their own works. The blockchain-based nature of these NFTs also provides an additional advantage around transparency when it comes to expected rates for platform licensing deals. Even if a solo independent artist found themselves in the position to get their music in one of these games or worlds, the lack of transparency normally makes it very hard to navigate and know what a fair deal looks like. With Dequency’s approach, artists will be able to easily see the fees that others receive for licensing their work simply by looking at a given blockchain’s ledger, and gain a better understanding of how music is being valued broadly by licensees. This, in turn, will allow artists to better set the terms of use for their own works.

Together, metaverse music distribution rails like those CreateSafe is working on, combined with the backend rights management systems such as those that the likes of BMAT, Audio Magic, and Dequency are working on, have the potential to transform digital licensing infrastructure as we know it. In the end, without the type of infrastructure in place that companies like BMAT are working on, it is incredibly difficult for metaverse platforms to comply with existing copyright law.

Therefore, virtual worlds and gaming platforms where artists can reach the highest number of people typically resort to the lowest-risk opportunities – either through royalty-free music or bespoke deals with labels and distributors where they can guarantee both quality and legal assurance. Many game creators including major studios like Riot Games have even shifted to employing in-house musicians to streamline rights and save on licensing costs.

The working solution that independent labels like Monstercat and sync/library music companies such as Position Music have arrived at to streamline licensing from their side is to control the entire copyright of the works in question, such that they are a “one-stop” licensing shop for platform partners. A step further is the blanket license, such that IP controllers could conceivably do a deal where they provide a blanket license to a game or world that covers all use for their IP for a certain duration. At this point in time, we found that deals are very custom, and because all of the virtual worlds at scale are essentially closed shops, they all have to do their own deals with rights holders, leaving little in the way of interoperability or continuity of IP across environments.

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The psychological experience at the core of the metaverse is one of fantasy, make-believe, and self-expression. In the most expansive vision of the metaverse, a user is free to assume the identity (avatar) of one’s choosing — and we’re already seeing many users take this opportunity to rep their favorite artist. This is appealing to fans on deep levels of human psychology: As Robert Cialdini details in his excellent work Influence, humans are programmed to look to our peers for reassurance and validation of a given behavior or belief. We look to others to validate what we do, what we think, and to feel safe and included in a particular group or club.

In the same way that we derive immense meaning from the actions and appearances of others, we inscribe even deeper meaning in our own personal actions and appearances. The clothes we wear, the way we style and groom ourselves, the mannerisms and slang we employ to express ourselves — all these factors come together to constitute our identity, including how we view ourselves and how we interact with the outside world.

In music, there is undeniably a clout and cooler-than-thou factor, for insider fans in the know, who learned the memes and copped the merch “before it was cool.” Let’s face it, many of us have been there, being early fans of a band, festival, or TV show, before its subsequent dilution and ruination at the hands of the unhip masses.

These social proof and status effects are being heightened in the metaverse, with the aforementioned ability to craft new and improved, hyper-realistic versions of ourselves. Instead of wearing four-inch platform boots, we can wear platform boots and be 10-feet tall. Instead of wearing a Marshmello t-shirt, we can either design our own helmet with a similarly mysterious aesthetic — or grab one designed by Marshmello himself. Instead of sporting your favorite rapper’s latest hit as your ringtone, you can add it to your virtual car’s radio station when you’re blowing up your latest mortal enemy while gaming with friends.

From the artist point of view, there are both monetization and engagement strategies at play here. Artists have new monetization channels to sell virtual merch (“verch”) in Metaverse worlds. At the same time, they have new top-of-funnel channels to grow their fanbase via existing fans sporting their likeness, or fan-to-fan interactions that deepen a sense of belonging to a particular fandom. Said plainly, today’s virtual worlds are presenting opportunities for artists to bring those fandom-reinforcing “sick shirt, bro” knowing nods between fans from the real world into the Metaverse.

Visual IP for identity and self-expression

A very direct approach to making artist IP available for user identity is for an artist to simply make their physical likeness a purchasable and playable avatar by their fans in the metaverse. In addition to selling verch during her performance in Roblox, Swedish popstar Zara Larrson also allowed attendees to purchase a customizable Zara avatar for the low price of £4.95 (US$5.96 today). Lil Nas X did similar during his Roblox performance. In these cases, fans in attendance who purchased an avatar could then become the performers themselves, literally embodying their fandom in the way they presented themselves visually in the metaverse. It’s not just looking like your favorite artist, but also being them.

Outside of selling their actual digital avatars, there is also a unique opportunity in the metaverse for those musicians whose artistic identity intersects style and fashion. One roadmap for style-related identity engagement comes from a recent collaboration between gaming company Electronic Arts and the popular preloved fashion website Depop. Alongside the release of the popular life simulation game Sims 4, gamers were able to purchase in-game clothing items that were designed by popular Depop influencers and sellers, all previously known for their own style IRL. The website announcing the collaboration makes explicit the identity-based component of the integration, with marketing copy that declares: “Those high school years can be awkward. Finding yourself, figuring out your style – it’s hard. We can’t promise, but we hope having the right outfit to express yourself makes it a little easier.”

From the point of view of musicians who pride themselves on their sense of personal style, there is a massive opportunity around designing virtual wearables that express their specific IRL look in virtual worlds. The Marshmello helmet head comes to mind as one expression of artist style that has translated into the virtual world as a wearable across multiple environments, including Roblox and Fortnite. Likewise, in addition to a full avatar of their likeness, Lil Nas X also offered specific items of wearable virtual clothing as part of their Roblox integration, with fans able to purchase a pink cowboy hat that matched the one they famously wore at the 2020 Grammy Awards. These types of wearable elements that are specific to an artist’s style translate especially well into virtual worlds — where an artist logo on a t-shirt, for example, might not translate well to being easily visible owing to limited graphics, but where a neon pink cowboy hat can immediately signal to everyone around that you are a fan of Lil Nas X.

In a similar vein to fashion style, artists might also look to the metaverse to capture and capitalize on their signature physical movements as performers, whether it be Elvis’ patented hip shake and rubber legs dance moves or BTS’ many signature dance moves. HEAT, a just launched project, hopes to provide a platform that will allow artists to capture their signature gyrations using motion capture technology and embed these moves in NFTs, for easy use with virtual world avatars.

Skipping past the technical elements of how this is accomplished, the resulting output will allow artists to create a version of their most beloved choreography that fans may then apply to their own virtual identity. Fans could, for instance, purchase or be given (as a reward for some form of artist related activity) an NFT containing a specific dance move, and then have their own avatar be able to perform that move. Imagine an artist holding a virtual concert who is able to airdrop ticket holders an NFT containing a specific dance move, and then have the entire audience perform it in unison. Not only would this produce a one-of-a-kind collective experience for those in attendance, but fans would be able to virtually walk out of the concert holding a new dance move for their avatar that they could then show off to friends as a social proof of attendance. On the backend, HEAT founder and artist Panther Modern also has hopes for this technology to help solve the problem of lack of attribution that pervades UGC-centric social platforms such as TikTok, where individual creators inadvertently end up creating immense value for the platform through their own dances without any upside. (To TikTok’s credit, they are working on improving their own in-app attribution system, but this will likely stay internal instead of being able to track crediting and attribution across platforms.)

Audio IP for social proof, remixing, and derivative works

Earlier in this article, we dove into the potential for Roblox to serve as a thriving ecosystem not only for user-generated visual assets, but also for user-generated audio, through features like Boombox and the Creator Marketplace — if only there weren’t a $200 million lawsuit standing in the way.

Another important caveat is the opaque payment around usage through music ID codes in Roblox. With the few rights holders who are involved, we don’t know at this time if this usage is covered through a blanket license, or tracked and paid per play. (Based on our knowledge around the data that is currently shared with music partners, the former seems most likely.) Even though there is a limitation to the scale of how music can be shared with Boombox, a whole scene has been born around it, with fan communities popping up around their proximity to a new genre, Robloxcore. The New York Times recently featured the 16 year old Robloxcore artist, Lungskull, whose Soundcloud currently shows over 2.2 million plays across his top 4 songs. It’s important to note that his music blew up when one of his “roblox friends” used his song “foreign” in a Tik Tok that went viral according to the NYT. If you’re wondering how to listen to your desired music in Roblox, here is a step by step guide on “How to Use Music IDs to Play Music on Roblox.

In our research we also glimpsed an approach to artists making their musical identity and IP more malleable for fan use through artificial intelligence and machine learning. While creative AI is still a relatively nascent field, the likelihood that many artists will have full-fledged digital versions of themselves is high as AI continues to improve over the coming years.

Holly Herndon is a notable artist and researcher who is experimenting with this technology through Holly+, a digital twin trained on recordings of her own voice. Fans can upload audio files through the Holly+ website and have it return a version of that audio sung back in Holly’s distinctive voice — mimicking not just her vocal timbre, but also her mannerisms based on several hours worth of training data. Applied to the metaverse, it’s not difficult to see how an artist might embed such a tool within a virtual world, allowing fans visiting to interact with their digital twin and create compositions using an artist’s digital likeness in real-time. Taken further, a fan might then be able to export and take that collaboration (since it was technically created with the artist’s likeness) creation off platform, to share with friends as well as potentially even monetize in partnership with the artist.

Of course, this approach does engage several legal and ethical issues. What does it mean to embody someone else’s likeness? How should the resulting IP be controlled and licensed? The Holly+ project is beginning to engage with many of these related questions through its associated DAO, which currently holds responsibility for deciding which Holly+ outputs are considered official. If approached thoughtfully, though, the use of AI likenesses may provide artists a new way of interacting and providing exciting new identity-based experiences for fans while engaging their desire for lasting connections.

How to execute on visual IP approaches

Across the visual IP use cases described above, there already exist opportunities for artists, both big and small, to begin engaging with fans and activating their sense of identity. Unlike their closed-house approach to user-generated music, Roblox allows users to design, produce, and sell visual identity related items using their Creator Studio tool. Though the fully customized artist avatars described above are not available for all users to create (these appear to be custom-designed integrations through direct deals with Roblox), producing wearable clothing items is available to anyone on the platform. To create a wearable, an artist can simply model an item in a 3D software program (Blender, for example) and then upload that directly to Creator Studio. The item is then able to be sold within the game’s Catalog; however users will have to pay an upload fee (in Robux), a selling fee when the item is first marked on-sale, and split revenues from item sales with the platform and with the creator of whichever Roblox game it is sold in (fees vary depending on the item).

The more decentralized metaverse platforms like Decentraland and Voxels are all very open to user-generated avatars and wearables, with several offering detailed guides for how to produce and bring them into the game. Voxels, for example, points users to MagicaVoxel, a free software tool for designing 3D voxel-based items. Where these worlds differ from the centralized platforms like Roblox is in the way they are sold. Wearable items produced in decentralized metaverses are packaged as NFTs, and can be bought and sold off-platform on popular NFT sites like OpenSea. This approach engages the technical features of the metaverse like continuity of data and interoperability (which we discuss in depth in our music metaverse design principles article), as it allows users to truly own and control the items they have produced, even taking them off platform for potential use in other metaverse worlds that use similar file standards. For musicians, this offers an advantage of continuing agency over their IP. Rather than surrender their work to centralized platforms and their specific terms of service, decentralized, NFT-based wearables allow for artists to maintain control of their visual IP and monetize it across the metaverse.

One notable exception to the openness that platforms seem to take towards avatar and wearable creations is Fortnite, with the platform essentially acting as a closed shop for avatars or wearables and maintaining full control over their internal economy. Currently, only those avatars and wearables officially released by Fortnite are playable, though this hasn’t stopped third-party developers from creating tools where users can mock up their own Fortnite avatars for out-of-game sharing.

Many of the interview subjects with which we spoke see these IP opportunities continuing to increase going forward, as the metaverse further breaks into the mainstream and the barrier to entry decreases with more decentralized worlds gaining traction. Tactics will vary depending on the artist’s brand and fanbase, but we see identity-based approaches, both visual and musical, as one of the most compelling and impactful avenues for major and independent artists alike to bring their IP into the metaverse.

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While we’ve described the myriad reasons why an artist might consider engaging with the metaverse and a few of the available pathways for doing so, building in the metaverse also has significant challenges. Below we detail some of the most common issues that we heard from our interviewees around establishing artist presence in the metaverse, as well as some of the more pressing global concerns around development, such as safety and adoption.

Show me the data!

As more and more artists create metaverse experiences, there is a follow-on need for them and their teams to gain access to the data surrounding those experiences, which allows them to develop a deeper understanding of impact and return on investment around various tools and platforms. This understanding is especially important for individual artists who may be working with limited resources; without giving access to proper data, we may be repeating the same sins of our current industry system (e.g. ticket vendors not providing artists with the identities of the fans who purchase tickets to their shows).

One observation that we heard multiple times across our interviews was that it is currently difficult for both users and direct partners to extract much meaningful data from metaverse platforms. As we discussed earlier in our breakdown of Roblox concert production, major-label executives typically are not given access to data that would allow them to understand which in-game activities lead to the most in-game purchases. When we asked Monstercat’s Mike Darlington about the depth of data they received from certain partners, he simply replied, “I wish we did. That would be sick. Give me their emails as well.”

Despite Monstercat partnering directly with platforms for musical integrations including placements within popular video games and in metaverse worlds such as Fortnite and Roblox, lots of that data is “held very close to the chest.” Nonetheless, Monstercat has been able to effectively leverage these partnerships by looking directly at artists’ streaming numbers and correlating them with the timing of high-profile uses within gaming worlds. For example, after a Monstercat artist’s song became the lead song on the popular video game, Rocket League, they were able to look and see an associated bump in that artist’s streaming numbers, confirming the efficacy of the placement in driving engagement across mediums and platforms. While this allows for high-level confirmation that game and metaverse licensing strategies are working and driving audience engagement and music consumption, it is ultimately difficult to understand which users are most engaged and which specific elements of a metaverse strategy are serving to convert fans from platform environments to other forms of engagement without more detailed attribution data. Head of Gaming at Monstercat, Gavin Johnson further explained “data is not always the number one priority for us … We almost see the games, the experiences themselves as youtube videos because this is all UGC at the end of the day. So as much music as we can get embedded into as many games and experiences as possible in the platform is very important to us.”

The major fear is that as metaverse platforms continue to grow and accumulate market share, they will opt to keep data siloed internally. This is similar to the way that major DSPs such as Spotify and Apple Music only provide artists with a limited set of data points to work from, rather than open access to the massive variety of data that can be gleaned from platform use. If even major record labels that are directly partnering with metaverse platforms aren’t provided detailed access to data from their integrations, how can we expect that emerging artists will be given the data and tools to make headway in similar environments?

Designing for social stickiness

As with the advent of many new technologies, one of the key challenges that we heard time and time again in our interviews around building sustainable metaverse experiences is catalyzing a critical mass of initial adoption that creates the incentives — both financial and social — for continuous growth and evolution to occur. Building on new technology is always a risk, and without a massive amount of users and creators engaging with metaverse platforms, developers will be unable to gather and employ key user perspectives and data to improve and iterate on the things they are constructing, and will also lack the financial resources produced by user-generated revenues to continue building.

As we explore in our report on music metaverse design principles, social immersion is ultimately related to one’s ability to feel a true sense of individual presence within the metaverse, and contributes to determining whether an individual will return repeatedly. We observed that one way to drive social interactions and repeat visits is to draw UX inspiration from gaming. We need only look to Roblox to see how orienting experiences around gaming can provide a structure on which additional social activity can take place. While the Roblox environment is nominally about playing and building on-platform games, we found that many of the players of Roblox come for the games, but stay for the social aspects of being on-platform. Timmu Tõke, the CEO of virtual avatar company Ready Player Me, captured this phenomena well when speaking with Rolling Stone earlier this year: “If you look at 13-year-olds today, they spend a lot of time playing games, but they wouldn’t call themselves ‘gamers’. They’re playing Roblox, Fortnite, they hang out there – socializing is the main activity.” This was also a major throughline in the interviews we conducted with young gamers throughout this season, in terms of social connection being the main source of value when spending time in these environments.

In our research interviews, we heard from young game players who expressed similar sentiments. One young game player (18 y.o.) told us that, though their experience playing Fortnite was tied to achieving the in-game objectives, they were also interested in the relationships that they were building on the platform, and in the team-building and communal strategy that comes from playing with others.

On the flipside, effective game design is much easier said than done — and absent games and their objective-based interactions, producing experiences that incite users to return to the metaverse repeatedly is challenging. Across our interviews, we heard how some non-gaming-centric metaverse platforms have struggled to figure out means to produce social experiences that engender user stickiness. The Band Room’s Shelley VanWitzenburg — told us that the biggest hurdle to growing the Decentraland ecosystem is figuring out how to connect the broader social picture for users. While individuals might come into DCL to take in a show at the TRU Band Room or play games at the virtual casino, they rarely stay and explore more than one experience.

As discussed earlier, virtual concert events provide a potential gateway for musical artists to bring audiences into the metaverse and generate large, one-time, event–related revenues. However, they do not in-and-of-themselves create social interactions that generate long-term participation in the metaverse by attendees. Artist activations seem to be turning increasingly to “gamification” to entice audiences to spend more time in and create ongoing connections within a given environment. Twenty One Pilots’ Roblox concert in fall of 2021, for example, included an in-world scavenger hunt element that rewarded participants with digital items including band verch (beanies; bandana) to be worn by users’ avatars, as well as a band-themed flag that a user could have their avatar wave during the concert. Since these items are only usable within the Roblox environment, they provide a reason for those who participated and earned them to keep coming back into Roblox, where they can proudly wear the items, displaying their support and receiving social credit for being fans of Twenty One Pilots.

Artists can also take a more grassroots approach to developing and maintaining an audience in the metaverse by establishing a strong community and focusing on artist<->fan and fan<->fan interactions and social bonds. Musical experiences like those mentioned above that take place in the TRU Band Room provide a concert experience while also being used by artists to create sticky social communities around their work. Our own W&M community members Lindsey Lonadier and Natalie Crue have been essential to establishing social communities within metaverse worlds that keep people coming back, through events such as the Metaverse Music Fest, a curated live music series that takes place across metaverse platforms and presents a diverse range of emerging artists. The series not only drew thousands of fans to their debut event and continues to draw hundreds of fans to their more frequent, ongoing events, but also produces a growing community of metaverse music fans who engage directly both with the artists and with each other.

Tim Exile, electronic artist and founder of the music-creation metaverse platform Endlesss, which allows users to co-create music together in real time, frames the challenge of stickiness as one of behavior change: “Some artists think Endlesss is a ‘cool tool,’” but ultimately when push comes to shove they “go back to their DAWs.” Their solution with Endlesss is to solve for immediate community needs not only by emphasizing the social creation aspect of the product itself, but also by working closely with onboarded users to allow them to shape what gets built, and ensuring that “the product is what the community actually wants.”

When push comes to shove, if metaverse builders and artists creating within these platforms are unable to create the engaging experiences and social stickiness required to keep users coming back, then their efforts will only result in short-term gains, ultimately leading to long-term sunk costs as audiences move on to the next thing.

Bridging traditional <> metaverse audiences

Related to artists’ struggle to develop experiences that produce recurring audience trips to the metaverse is the challenge of bridging metaverse-native with more traditional audiences. Many of the artists we spoke with described this difficulty, noting that as they have begun engaging with creating metaverse-based musical experiences, they have seen their audience broken into distinct, fragmented groups — including those who engage through more traditional means such as music streaming and traditional social platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc.) on one end, and those who have been willing to take the leap into exploring new technology-enabled experiences such as metaverse concerts on the other.

Tropix told us how they maintain fully separate niches and funnels in developing their audiences in different environments. While they have established a growing audience for their metaverse DJ gigs over the past year, they’ve also explicitly separated their pre-existing fans from their newer metaverse-driven fans, noting that they’ve been “careful to cultivate multiple audiences” through continuing to perform at more traditional bookings such as college DJ tours. They were also clear on the fact that they never push the technology-focused side of their musical identity on fans — from performances in the metaverse to forays into Web3 and NFTs — preferring to allow for more organic engagement to form across the musical realms they inhabit. (This is quite similar to how many independent artists we spoke with in our previous research intentionally separate their Web3 fans from other fans when it comes to NFT onboarding.)

While none of the artists and metaverse promoters we spoke with had clear answers on the ideal method for bridging individuals into the metaverse, the one common focus was on spending at least some time and resources to provide clear onboarding resources (as we discussed earlier). Shelley VanWitzenburg of the TRU Band Room notes that part of their onboarding involves setting the expectations for artists who are making their first foray into performing in the metaverse. “Some Web2 artists come in with this attitude of ‘I’m going to take over the metaverse,’” she says, adding that she often has to remind artists that unless they’re onboarding their pre-existing fans explicitly, entering the metaverse is basically like starting over.

Technology as a friction point

That the metaverse requires learning an entire new set of technologies and user interfaces is itself a major challenge for artists and musicians wanting to onboard their fans. New technology will always produce a friction point, as any extra effort required to learn a new technology will always be met with some form of resistance from potential users, who prefer to maintain their existing habits and behaviors.

Relatedly, the hardware required to access the metaverse can be expensive, with VR headsets and related accessories such as spatial audio-enabled headphones costing in the hundreds of dollars and limiting the potential for widespread consumer adoption. Even when we convened research meetups in several popular metaverse platforms such as Decentraland and Roblox that could be accessed via desktop, many individuals from our research community experienced less than optimal performance, including glitchy video and audio that limited how they were able to interact with the worlds themselves and with others in them.

AmazeVR co-founder Ernest Lee told us that part of the difficulty is that the metaverse is made up of simultaneously emerging technologies that are all at different stages of development. “All these different components, core components of what will comprise the metaverse — they need to first and independently mature as a technology and become adopted,” he tells us. There’s no easy way to overcome these difficulties in performance other than to wait until the technology matures, but in the meantime, the performance difficulties and friction created by the technology, as well as financial obstacles to access, will continue to present a barrier for bringing audiences into the metaverse.

In our previous research on emerging technologies like Web3, we identified education as a top fan concern that artists also had more control over addressing in their onboarding strategies, at least in comparison to wider infrastructural matters. The metaverse is no different: For artists wanting to help their fans overcome external barriers to entry to musical metaverse experiences, putting effort into developing easy guides, tools and resources explaining the simplest path for fans to get started is essential. Even providing the basics including step-by-step explainers on how to access specific experiences can help lower the lift required to convince fans that it’s worth their efforts to engage.

Safety concerns

One further multi-faceted challenge for the metaverse is ensuring that platforms are designed to maximize safety and allow users to experience virtual worlds openly, with as few negative outcomes as possible.

Unfortunately, just because something takes place in a virtual world does not make it immune to the bad actors and safety-related challenges of IRL. The corporate watchdog organization Sum Of Us recently released a research report detailing the rise of toxic content and experiences in the metaverse across a number of key issues including sexual assault; sexual, homophobic, and racist comments and abuse; inadequate processes for reporting violations; failure to take action against users who violate platforms guidelines; and the ease for children to use the platform and encounter harms. Similarly, a recent survey of US adults conducted by Morning Consult showed that when considering the metaverse, many are extremely concerned about safety. 44% of survey respondents replied saying cyberbullying was a major concern, followed by 39% and 38% of respondents, respectively, citing personal safety and sexual harassment. Altogether, that’s roughly 2 in 5 survey respondents who are worried about safety in the metaverse.

Concerns around the mental health impacts of spending time in the metaverse are also becoming more prevalent. We know that overuse of digital technologies is associated with negative mental health outcomes such as increased likelihood of depression, especially for children and young people. Research into the specific impact of metaverse worlds on mental health is still nascent and more needs to be done to pull apart the causal relationships between specific metaverse activities and distinct mental health outcomes. At the very least, metaverse builders need to turn their attention to understanding the potential effect of what they are building on the mental health of large populations of users.

The solutions to safety and wellbeing concerns in the metaverse are not simple or singular. Some platforms such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds have begun experimenting with technological fixes including features such as Safe Zone, which can be activated to create a bubble that prevents interactions from other users when individuals feel threatened. While it is tempting to think that technological solutions like Safe Zone can provide a perfect fix for safety and mental health related issues, these problems are also a product of the larger culture in which they emerge. Rather, a mix of wide-ranging education, strong platform policies, and reporting mechanisms and enforcement is needed alongside technological solutions.

And more than any of these elements individually, what first needs to happen is for safety to become a clear priority for the companies and developers creating the metaverse. If builders prioritize safety upfront in their work, they will produce metaverse worlds that incentivize good behavior and mental health from the get-go, rather than treating safety as an issue that needs to be dealt with once problems have already grown beyond a solvable point. As in medicine, preventative rather than reactive measures are ultimately the best route to good health, no matter what environment you find yourself in.

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CONCLUSION

The concept of the metaverse in the first place was coined via speculative fiction (in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash), so it makes sense that a fitting phrase for the future of the metaverse also comes from the speculative fiction world, via author William Gibson: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

As our analysis above suggests, this notion of an uneven future applies well to music/metaverse experiences if they continue in their current state. Whether in following the millions of dollars being generated in some of these worlds or in witnessing the interactive, visually impressive experiences that such dollars produce, few would deny the myriad opportunities that exist to use metaverse-related tools and platforms to cast the creative and social power of music in a new light, and on an unprecedented scale. But while the opportunities in and of themselves might be clear, the paths to reach them are not. In many cases, bringing one’s music into the metaverse requires access to highly selective and exclusive industry partners who have direct deals with platforms, and/or significant investment in upfront capital to hire the right developers and partners to execute on more immersive experiences, leaving independent artists in the dust. On the flipside, this means that many existing self-serve, open-ended metaverse platforms that otherwise might be a boon to the independent music sector are relatively content-poor compared to larger game developers — with little in the way of curated or personalized content, let alone clear wayfinding to find that content.

All of this is to say that there is a clear mutual incentive at play for more collaboration and co-creation between music companies and metaverse platforms. Music artists, especially those from independent and underground circles, are craving new kinds of storytelling, fan-engagement and monetization opportunities in a world where the dominant industry models are increasingly failing them. In the other direction, metaverse worlds arguably need a wider diversity of content creation and distribution opportunities within their own environments if they want to be the next drivers of pop culture at all levels, both top-down and bottom-up.

We hope this article serves as a helpful first step in bridging gaps in mutual knowledge and access between these two worlds, in a way that keeps artists’ needs and visions at the center. The bright side is that the concept of the “metaverse” is still so nascent that it is malleable in a way that the traditional music industry is not, such that we have the chance to build genuinely new infrastructure that can improve upon the industry’s previous mistakes.

Most of all, we hope this inspires further action and exploration for you, as you dive deeper into all that the vision of the metaverse has to offer for music and the industry that powers it. If you’re interested in helping us with our ongoing music/metaverse research, we would love to hear from you — let us know and get involved in our future reports!

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SEASON 2 CONTRIBUTORS

👑 🧠 🎙️ 🔎 Brodie Conley, Chrissy Greco, Cherie Hu, Yung Spielburg, Tom Vieira
👑 🧠 💻 🔎 Alexander Flores
🧠 🎙️ 🔎 Katherine Rodgers, Kristin Juel, Lindsey Lonadier, Maarten Walraven
🧠 🤝 🔎 Panther Modern
🧠 🔎 Chinua Green, Julie Kwak, Mat Ombler, Tony Rovello, Demi Wu
🤝 🔎 Abhijit Nath, Christina Calio
🎙️ Dorothée Parent-Roy, Brooke Jackson, Cosmin Gafta, Diana Gremore, Duncan Byrne, Eric Peterson, JhennyArt, Josh Dalton, Mary Maguire, Muñeca Diaz
🔎 Natalie Crue, Robin Lynn, Chris Nunes, Gabriel Appleton, Jonathan Larson, Yanti
💻 Ana Carolina
🤝 Alex Kane, Anne McKinnon, Coldie, Dan Radin, Dani Balcells, Daouda Leonard, Deborah Mannis-Gardner, Dylan Marcus, Ernest Lee, EZ, Gavin Johnson, Greg LoPiccolo, Ian Prebo, Jacqueline Bosnjak, Jaguar Twin, Jillian Jones, Jon Vlassopulos, Jonathan Mann, Josh Hubberman, Keatly Haldeman, Margaret Link, Meredith Gardner, Mike Darlington, Peacenode, Portrait XO, Rohan Paul, Roman Rappak, Shawn Ullman, Shelley Van, Soundromeda, Spinkick.eth, Stacey Haber, Tim Exile, Tropix, Vandal, Wackozacco, Wagner James Au
🎮 Alexander (15), Jackson (15), Vondell (18), Ava (8), Noah (14), Olivia (6), Toma Zaharia (10), Valentina (14), Luca Zaharia (14)

👑 Project leads
🧠 Meta-synthesis analysts + writers + editors
🎙️ Interviewers
💻 Tech + visual design
🔎 Project development + background research
🤝 Interviewees + meetup/demo guides
🎮 Young gamer interviewees — all connected to us through W&M members 🙂