What These Metaverse Websites Are Trying To Telling You
Understanding the language of Web3 and the metaverse can be challenging, even for the most clued-in music and media professionals.
When Strangeloop Studio, the LA-based media production company behind concert visuals, immersive experiences, music videos, and new narrative forms for musicians (Lil Nas X, Flying Lotus, The Weeknd, David Gilmore) and brands (Adidas, Intel) offered to speak with The Cadence about their Spirit Bomb virtual artists project, we agreed on the condition that they would help our readers understand what these cutting-edge creatives and technologists are talking about.
CEO Ian Simon took us step-by-step through the website to offer some clarity.
1. Earth’s First Virtual Artist Label
There was a major label exec a few years ago who said that all record labels now are multimedia labels because of the way the content ecosystem works. You can't just release music and expect it to be successful. You have to have the full suite of visual content to go along with it.
So each of our characters is a hub for multiple creatives to put their music in our albums in the world. We've got the people who are the fans of the virtual artists who are listening to their music, watching their live streams, interacting with them in the discord. And the success of each artist is going to be dependent on how much they're resonating with crowds and how much people want to contribute to them.
2. Art Above Ego
“Art Above Ego” was one of the challenges that we set for ourselves. Can we actually create a community where what's best for the collective is put above individual artistic pursuits? Which I think is a trade-off that a lot of people do make in creative scenarios.
3. A New Artistic Medium
We think this is a new medium is because it's a form of artistic expression that isn't contained in an existing media vertical. There isn't a defined space where you would consume this content. That is the main way we distinguish it from other media like TV or movies, or even like, fanfic.
4. Virtual Artists As Instruments of Shared Creativity
What you need to the sort of playbook for standing one up, both technically and then from a go-to-market perspective. So we're building the pipeline and the process. The next part is the governance architecture and how you bring in a community to where you introduce decision points and how you are able to involve a lot of people without having it be complete chaos.
5. Virtual Beings That Possess Distinct Traits & Backstories
For our first characters, we went towards Jungian archetypes and Campbellian narrative to create very basic sets of, of like personality traits and principles. Then we worked as a team to flesh out some of the lore and backstory and try to give just enough so that it felt like there was a distinct character to put out into the world and see what people thought and then start building out the character based on the feedback and what was resonating with people.
6. A Multiplicity of Creators Can Contribute
The IP is the virtual artist and then all those people are the creative collaborators that bring the character to life. We've got musicians creating music for the characters, visual designers who are helping to design them and people who are writing the lore for each character.
7. Multi-Collaborative & Community Empowered
The perfect example is LV4. When we designed him, we thought he was going to be a tough, swaggy, hip-hop producer. And when we dropped his first video, I don't know if it was the antennas or the way he moved or whatever, but the reaction was, “Oh my God, he's so cute. Look at this little sweet robot.” And so we pivoted, like, okay, that's who he is. He's a naive bull in china shop character fumbling around the world, trying to figure out his own existence. And he became a much more multi-faceted character.
8. A Web3 Native Record Label For Decentralized Virtual Beings
It took us a minute to feel comfortable saying that we want it to be Web3 native because a lot of the hype cycle around blockchain tech has been pretty abstracted from where the value actually lies. But there are a couple of aspects that really resonated with us.
One is a real emphasis on ownership. Contributors are splitting revenue as opposed to one paying another one a flat fee. The second is we had this idea from the outset that our characters would have multiple creative contributors. And we always wanted those creatives to be along for the ride. So if their song is responsible for blowing up the character, maybe they have a royalty on the song, but the character is also generating income from all these other ways, live shows and merch.
Were talking about our lawyers about how can we fractionalize ownership of these characters into tens, or hundreds, or thousands of contributors. They were talking about creating a joint venture and issuing stock options. And in my head I'm like, these are like 14-year-old kids on SoundCloud.
But part of the promise of NFTs is that they can be a way to buy into a creative community and be along for the ride. There's this real push to develop tools that allow for fractionalized ownership in a way that felt really in line with what we are really talking about — a de-centralized creative process.
9. Digital Assets for the Token Economy
Starting with LV4, we created a series of 4,000 meta passes for him, which are NFTs done in the profile picture style with 4,444 unique randomly assigned generative traits. We call them the keys to LV4’s creative consciousness.
So your token to get into the creative community and also to help fund the project. Then as LV4 rises in popularity, the value of those tokens from a collector’s angle is going to go up. Your role as a contributor is rewarded just like owning a first pressing of an album. Except that you have a little bit more control over your own destiny by potentially helping develop that album, make that album more valuable.
10. Full-Stack Virtual Artist Production
When you look at touring, that's where you see some of the unprecedented scaling that a virtual artist can do compared to a real person. Rather than having to bus around the country and fly around the world, you just have the tech there and the USB stick with the virtual artist.
11. Music Creation for the New Century
There are so many musicians out there who aren’t getting heard because they're not good at promoting themselves on social media. Our characters could be a way for that music to get out into the world because we're creating this really engaging visual content for people to consume. So we've been focusing on finding a way to create a cohesive audio identity for these characters while also really opening it up to a lot of people while trying to avoid the whiplash of feeling like every song is from a different creative collaborator.
12. Lightweight Unreal Engine Pipeline, High-Throughput Character Design Workflow, Best-In-Class Virtual Artist Concerts
For years, we were producing visuals primarily in Cinema 4D, which is a prosumer software that could create really photo-real images. Unreal engine has the capacity to actually run the graphics in real-time like you're a video game. But for a long time, the chasm between that and video game engines like Unreal and Unity was massive. Then a couple of years ago, it just kept getting better and better until the outputs from Unreal were exciting for us creatively to seriously consider it as our main vehicle for content production.
13. Virtual Beings As Community Gateway
The thing I'd like elaborate on here is the second bullet point. One of the perks is access to Strangeloop as a studio, especially for people who want to learn more about visual design or what it's like to work in the concert industry or just want to talk about fractals or movies. We want to make ourselves available for sharing knowledge. And we're always looking for talent too. So it's also a place for us to find future creative collaborators.
TAKEAWAYS
Salient statements from this week’s music news.
1. Creator Economy Report Reveals Only 12% of Full-Time Creatives Make Over 50K Per Year
As more people enter the creator economy, wage slave metrics like hours worked fail to correlate with dollars earned.
Takeaways: According to Linktree’s report, 32% of creators who made at least $10K a year spent more than ten hours per week on their content. 52% of creators who made between $50-100K dedicated less than ten hours per week to making new content.
2. Musicians Struggle to Break Even as Venues and Universal Cream Off Merch Sales
Artists are opting out of merch or switching to pop-up shops to avoid 25% venue fees.
Takeaway: Acts are now taking direct action and pulling merchandise from shows at venues that take a cut. Some venues have used the problem as an opportunity to poach acts from rivals: the agent for one major international act recently booked them into an outdoor stadium, rather than a competitor venue, because it offered zero commission on merchandise sales.
3. Telekom Electronic Beats launches club experience in Roblox
Featuring DJs Boris Brejcha and David Guetta, the initiative offers a glimpse of what the trifecta of music x tech x brands can accomplish in the metaverse.
Takeaway: Users can take on various virtual nightlife jobs in the Beatland world, including record store manager and promoter. They can also buy different outfits and various digital items (“verch”) in the record store and Telekom Shop with Beat Coins, a virtual currency that is earned by completing activities. The currency raised is then used to enhance the Beatland world.
