How the metaverse promises to transform how we interact with music online (guest column) – Music Ally

This is aguest post by Tim Exile, CEO and founder ofmusic-making app Endlesss, which is experimenting with someinteresting projects that connect with its core business, including mintingroyalty-sharingNFTs and launching a label. Tim and Endlesss are also interested in how music will connect withthe metaverse the loosely-connected bunch ofdigital spaces like gaming universes, virtual reality, and augmented reality so we asked him to write about his thoughts on thefuture of this space. He sees an exciting new environment where ourrelationship with the space itself is its value proposition and a huge business opportunity.

The metaverse is here, and it promises a new world in which our online lives mirror our reality. This new world infused with virtual real experiences is a new reality where online becomes an extension of our real lives. Its a destination in itself that shares the spatial, relational and cultural characteristics of our real world.

Like in real life, what happens when we come together in spaces in the metaverse will build the cultural value and status of those places and the people that frequent them. The metaverse will transform creativity from todays content production process to a co-present social interaction where everyone participates in the creation of culture and value. As the metaverse flourishes in the coming years, trillions of dollars of cultural economic activity will be brought into this new world.

Tim Exile

Today, our online lives play out on apps or sites where we go to share, discover and engage with content. Social media sites offer a way to document our real lives. They thrive on standout viral content which pulls us back to consume yet more content, capturing our attention. However, theyre not places to be in the same way as the places we live and gather in the real world.

The metaverse, on the other hand, is more of an extension of our tangible world where our online lives play out in spaces that function more like real-world spaces. While social media thrives on content that generates attention, the metaverse thrives on co-presence and composable interactions that build cultural value.

In the metaverse, creativity will be something we participate in when we show up in virtual spaces, with one another, in real time. It will be one of many aspects of our interaction in the metaverse alongside conversation, game-play and financial transactions. This doesnt mean the metaverse will be devoid of content: rather our relationship to media in the metaverse will be the inverse, as the container.

For example; if you go to a restaurant, you dont consume the decor as content, you experience the decor as the container.

One way to conceptualise the essence of the metaverse is to imagine going to Ronnie Scotts Jazz Club in London. Once there, you enter into a relationship with its rich history, the space and its decor, and the evenings performers. You and the rest of the audience experience the music as a ritual, amplified and focussed by the ambience of the venue. The venue is decorated with visible autographed portraits of the performers who have played there, and the invisible storytelling and myth-making behind the Ronnie Scotts brand.

In this way, Ronnie Scotts is a living space: a container for us to gather in, constantly growing in richness, depth and value, constantly being refreshed and redecorated by new rituals. These rituals often generate media audio recordings, images or videos. Aside from being collateral for their social media manager, the biggest impact of this media is to reinforce the container; the Ronnie Scotts brand and venue.

Endlesss

In the metaverse, creativity will unfold as an ongoing sequence of co-present interactions, building an ever-expanding relational, composable history of creativity that enriches the spaces we gather in. What we create and how as well as where we create it and with who will all be essential metadata. It will be that which proves the value of our creativity, and ascribes cultural status to the people we create with, and the spaces we create in.

Rather than producing content to compete for attention, the outputs of our creativity in the metaverse will be symbols, narratives or experiences. Theyll encapsulate and communicate the value of the spaces we gather in, and the status of the people that gather there.

At Endlesss, weve been building metaverse-ready containers for creativity since we launched our beta product in 2019. We started with music, but the infrastructure weve built applies to any creative medium: audio, video, images, code.

As the promise of the metaverse is realised in the coming years, were incredibly excited to play our part in building the root-level infrastructure that changes the way we interact online, and offers creators of all types a new world of unbounded possibilities.

Joe Sparrow

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How the metaverse promises to transform how we interact with music online (guest column) - Music Ally