The metaverse might be one of the buzziest and most polarizing concepts in modern technology, let alone in the music industry.
On the one hand, investment banks see the metaverse as a $13 trillion market opportunity by 2030 — and music startups are jumping on the bandwagon, raising billions of dollars in venture funding in the last two years. At the same time, the metaverse suffers from a lack of accessible tools and infrastructure for artists and creators, as well as from several contradictory public narratives competing for attention. Players like Epic Games and Meta are building highly centralized visions for the metaverse in the same breath that underground music and art communities are using more custom, decentralized virtual worlds to map an entirely different blueprint for our digital future.
Amidst this chaotic landscape, we thought it would be perfect to tackle the metaverse as our research focus for Season 2 — cutting through the noise and hype to build out a clearer, more actionable roadmap for what truly innovative, digital-native music metaverse experiences could look like. Over the course of 12 weeks, we read foundational theoretical works on the metaverse as a whole, demoed both established and up-and-coming music metaverse platforms, and interviewed more than 25 artists, developers, and music-industry professionals to capture their grounded understanding of the concept. The result is a four-part report featuring a set of frameworks for understanding the highest-leverage creative, commercial, and technical opportunities to improve the musical metaverse, with several potential paths for artists and their teams to start experimenting with metaverse-related tools and platforms today.
We will continue to study the evolution of this realm, as experimentation and practice drive iterative refinements and new use cases for music/metaverse projects. Alongside this report, the best way to get acclimated with our DAO and community, and to learn more about how you can get involved, is to join our membership:
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