Walk-Up Music for Avatars
Direct-to-Avatar (D2A) is a new method of interacting with consumers through digital identities. Our human desires to connect, understand and express individuality will translate to the digital representations of ourselves in the Metaverse. Companies like Crucible are leading the way in helping individuals create and manage those digital identities. To participate in a digital ecosystem, you have to be a digital asset yourself. Crucible offers a way to create identities and personas with managed access permissions selectable by platform. Skins, avatars, and other digital fashion are projected to grow exponentially over the next five to ten years, which means people are becoming just as interested in how they are perceived in the Metaverse as they are in the physical world.
How could this trend apply to music?
Tomorrowland 2020 took virtual concert experiences to a new level by generating almost 200 hours of footage using green screens, 3D stages, and even hundreds of extras to make it feel live. The next step for concert experiences like these and Ariana Grande’s Fortnite Rift Tour is fan participation and interaction and that will be rooted in self-sovereign identities and avatars.
Through a partnership with Genies, Warner Music Group is stepping into the Metaverse by creating avatars of their roster and offering digital merchandise for fans to purchase for their own avatars. While these avatars are based on real people, the music industry is very familiar with avatars based on the ideas of people. Lil’ Miquela and Hatsune Miku have garnered huge followings without having a heartbeat. Going back even further, the Gorillaz kicked off the idea of digital avatars and bands in 1998.
If I created an avatar for myself, how would I use music?
For many, music provides a subtle but supporting emotional arc for our experiences. In fact, as I write this, my experience is scored by the Brain Food playlist on Spotify. It puts me into a creative mode, drives a little focus, and if I’m lucky generates a little flow state. How could this translate into the virtual arena? Walk-up songs seem like an interesting place to start. Look at what the Alan Parsons Project did for the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Among other athletes, boxers, wrestlers, and baseball players use walk-up music to generate a mindset change. The best athletes in the world can go from a state of rest to game-ready very quickly, and music often powers this transition.
While working with Orangetheory Fitness, I researched the effects of music on athletic performance, which led to custom scoring a virtual running experience. According to a leading researcher in fitness science and music, Costas Karageorghis, entrainment and dissociation are two ways music helps to reduce our RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion or how hard we think we are working) during a workout. Entrainment occurs when your body synchronizes to a collective rhythm. One example of this is a group of military cadets marching to a verbal cadence. A simpler example is dancing. Dissociation leans on the lyrical content, textures, and moods of the music to help distract from burning lungs and tired legs. These two powerful principles can certainly apply outside of fitness activity. Music is also one of the leading indicators of personal identity. In a sense, we are what we listen to, and music can help us connect to others in the physical world and the Metaverse.
A finished song or a collection of music stems driven by a game engine could be a great complement to a digital identity and avatar. Imagine this musical counterpart tied to motion and action as you move through situations in various virtual worlds. If you recall from the Open Source Framework for Utility, Domain Transportability was one of the principles, meaning that the ability for a digital asset to move between the physical and virtual as well as between different virtual worlds is directly related to a higher utility. While I hope to explore music rights in the Metaverse in later posts, avatar walk-up songs that seamlessly move through virtual worlds could be a powerful new use case for music.
If you’ve noticed lately, Cryptopunks are replacing personal images on social media accounts. These are visual expressions of the personality of the owners of the NFT. Just wait until personal digital representations move further into Web 3.0 with music riding shotgun. Stay tuned!
