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As real-life touring continues to be plagued by cancellations, Soulja Boy, Dillon Francis and Ozzy Osbourne are turning to virtual worlds. The Metaverse Music Festival returns on Nov. 10-13 for its second year in Decentraland — an immersive digital world built using blockchain technology and owned by its users — with more than 100 artists across 15 stages. The event will be free to attend and no crypto wallet is required to participate.
Set in a cyberpunk city of the future, Dillon Francis will open the festival with a “mega club” experience projected on several screens, while Soulja Boy will perform through a virtual avatar. The digital setting also allows for elaborate stage design. “The final [headline set] should look like a city from the future, abandoned for 100 years,” says Sam Hamilton, creative director at Decentraland Foundation.
Despite the metaverse backdrop, the team hopes to recreate a real-life festival experience, complete with atmospheric rain (every festival needs mud), custom dance moves called ‘emotes,’ pop-up nightclubs and even a virtual porta-potty experience.
“[We’re] trying to capture that chaos that happens at a real festival inside a digital world,” explains Hamilton.
The festival features a diverse lineup thanks to Decentraland’s global community picking many of the performers. “We’re curating the main stage,” says Iara Dias, head of the Metaverse Music Festival, “but we gave the rest of the stages to the community for curation.” As a result, the lineup also features Chinese idol group SNH48 and Japan’s J-pop group Atarashii Gakko!
“Rather than trying to be American-centric,” adds Hamilton, “We’re trying to give a cultural experience to everybody that they wouldn’t normally be able to have.”
More than 50,000 attendees logged into Decentraland to experience 2021’s inaugural event with performances from crypto-native artists including Deadmau5, 3LAU, RAC and Alison Wonderland. This year will also feature crypto favorites like CryptoPunk rapper Spottie Wifi and British DJ Akira the Don, but the foundation hopes that a roster of bigger names will expand the festival’s reach.
Virtual music performances have grown in popularity in recent years, partly due to COVID-19 lockdowns putting IRL concerts on hold. Travis Scott and Ariana Grande both played virtual concerts in Fortnite’s virtual gaming world, while MTV launched a Best Metaverse Performance category.
Decentraland, however, is different from corporate metaverses like Fortnite as it is owned and operated by its users through crypto technology. The land inside the world can be bought and traded by the community who then choose what to build. Wearables and digital items can be traded on the platform’s native marketplace.
“The big difference is philosophy,” says Hamilton. “We believe that the user should not be the product, but should own and direct the product.”
Decentraland’s community also helps make decisions through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Despite last year’s metaverse hype, however, these virtual crypto worlds are not as popular as Fortnite, Roblox and others. As the tide goes out on the metaverse mania, Decentraland has approximately 60,000 monthly active users according to data provided by the foundation; a small number compared to the tens of millions of daily users on gaming worlds like Roblox.
“We’re working hard to catch up with the hype,” admits Hamilton. “We needed longer to build out a better platform with more features but the hype [of 2021] came too quickly.”
Last year’s festival brought in Decentraland’s biggest numbers of the year, and Hamilton believes this year’s event will bring another wave of new users to the platform. “The metaverse is inevitable,” he concludes. Zooming out, he envisions a network of virtual worlds, some centralized and some decentralized, but not necessarily dominated by one company or platform. “This is definitely happening.”
Kanye West is offering to buy right-wing friendly social network Parler shortly after being booted off Twitter and Instagram for antisemitic posts.
Parlement Technologies, which owns the platform, and West, legally known as Ye, said the acquisition should be completed in the fourth quarter, but details like price were not revealed. Parlement Technologies said the agreement includes the use of private cloud services via Parlement’s private cloud and data center infrastructure.
Ye, was locked out of Twitter and Instagram a week ago over antisemitic posts that the social networks said violated their policies. In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
Ye is no stranger to controversy, once suggesting slavery was a choice and calling the COVID-19 vaccine “the mark of the beast.” Earlier this month, he was criticized for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt to his collection at Paris Fashion Week.
The potential purchase of Parler would give Ye control of a social media platform and a new outlet for his opinions with no gatekeeper.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” Ye said in a prepared statement.
The acquisition could also breathe new life into Parler, which has struggled amid competition from other conservative-friendly platforms like Truth Social. Parler, which launched in August 2018, didn’t start picking up steam until 2020. But it was kicked offline following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A month after the attack, Parler announced a relaunch. It returned to Google Play last month.
“This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech,” Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said in a prepared statement.
Grammy-nominated DJ and producer Steve Aoki takes another step into the metaverse in a special Halloween fashion collaboration with Deadfellaz — an NFT project made up of 10,000 undead, zombie characters.
The collection features a limited-edition run of varsity jackets, skate decks, tees and hoodies designed by Deadfellaz co-founders Betty and Psyche. The centerpiece of the “Deadfellaz x Dim Mak” collection — a nod to Aoki’s record label and fashion brand — is an ultra rare varsity jacket, complete with a twin digital “wearable” that can be unlocked in the metaverse.
“NFTs and Web3 are the future,” said Aoki. “It has been such an adventure to create alongside pioneers such as Betty and Psych of the Deadfellaz Horde. Deadfellaz is an incredible project and a community that I am proud to also be a part of. I am honored to drop this collaboration for our Horde and share our passion with the world – the pieces are colorful, effervescent, and luxurious; I can’t wait to rock them!”
This is not the first time Aoki has partnered with the Deadfellaz community, known as the ‘Horde.’ He DJ’d at their first virtual Halloween event last year while Betty and Psych created a custom 1/1 zombie character for him called the ‘Aoki-fella.’
“Working with Steve has been so fun,” said Betty and Psych, co-founders of Deadfellaz. “He has embraced Web3 and helped shape the space as it is so far, which has been especially impactful given his incredible success given his incredible success in a multitude of spaces like music, fashion, art, tech, and more. This collaboration comes a year after Steve DJ’d an exclusive set for The Horde at our very first Deadfellaz metaverse event last Halloween, so it feels very special to us.”
The fashion collection will be fully revealed at this year’s Deadfellaz Halloween party, Deadzone LA, October 29. Taking place at Skylight ROW in LA’s Art District, the party will feature live performances, DJ sets and “multisensory experiences.”
Aoki has been an early-adopter of Web3 and a core part of the NFT community. He launched the Aokiverse in 2021 — a metaverse fan club powered by NFT access, which allows fans to unlock guest list passes for concerts, free NFTs and exclusive merch. Aoki is also a prolific NFT collector with a wallet full of Crypto Punks, Doodles and Deadfellaz.
Launched in August 2021, Deadfellaz is a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs based on zombie artwork by acclaimed digital artist Psych and co-founder Betty who has been a champion of diversity and inclusivity in the NFT space. Between them, they have created a global brand with more than $80 million in sales.