Category: Metaverse
The metaverse is perhaps best understood not as a concrete thing, but rather as a desired state for how we interact online and offline, especially when it comes to more fluid, social expressions of identity and fandom. As a research community, we are especially interested in how the metaverse (especially gaming and virtual worlds) can help artists and their teams monetize their IP, grow their audiences, engage with existing fans, and build immersive, cutting-edge experiential layers on top of music.
In September 2022, Space Ape Games announced that its mobile rhythm game Beatstar had generated $73 million in revenue — and shared over $16 million of its income with rightsholders, in a revenue-share model that is almost unheard of in the video game industry.
There’s been a significant rise in music and gaming collaborations across mobile games, rhythm games, virtual world platforms, and more. But the barriers to entry remain high for most independent artists.
Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, has collaborated with Lil Nas X on the 2022 League of Legends World Championship (Worlds) Tournament anthem, “Star Walkin.’”
Justin Bieber played his first-ever in-game concert in Garena Free Fire, a battle-royale game exclusive to mobile devices, on August 27, 2022. Did it generate the buzz and results that we expected!
Introducing our new, collaborative editorial vertical about the future of work in the music business. On a biweekly basis, our research team highlights the most interesting jobs emerging in music — “interesting” defined as involving new technologies, skill sets, strategic priorities, and cross-industry synergies like in gaming, fitness, and podcasts — as a vector for charting potential futures for the music industry as a whole.
Introducing our new, collaborative editorial vertical exploring the intersection of music and video games.
A self-directed guide for artists and their teams to explore the diverse set of entry points into musical metaverse experiences.
Cutting through the hype to present tangible, focused opportunities for growth and improvement around one of the most in-demand and fundamental use cases for musical metaverse experiences today: Having fun with friends.
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.
A set of nine artist- and fan-centric design principles for building the next generation of musical metaverse experiences.
Where the production and physical space limitations for this type of augmented reality inhibits scaling this type of experience to mass audiences, we can see the metaverse – with its many platforms and worlds, and with varying levels of interactivity – being a place where we see more of these estates extend their reach using new technologies.