Weekly News: New Kids on the Block: VR Concerts
What’s the new progress happening in the music market?
You might think that innovation in the music industry has reached its liminal stage when Spotify and Youtube replaced our WalkMan and CD. Guess what? You are wrong.
Nowadays, tech companies like MelodyVR and Oculus Venues are working to bring the next Wiz Khalifa concert right to your comfy couch, at least virtually.
Digital technology has altered the music industry from time to time. And for long, it brought adverse implications rather than beneficial impacts. The ’00s and 10’s decades saw internet users effortlessly downloaded music albums from Pirate Bay. Or leaked artists’ new hits on Youtube even before the official releases. And then we have Spotify, which only pays artists 0.6–0.84 cents every time their songs are streamed.
Because of this, many artists shift their focus for earnings to live performance.
But live performance indeed has its problem, too. Space and scale are always limited and thus quantity is always an issue.
And the answer to this limitation? More technology.
VR Concert
Recently, some popular singers have agreed to collaborate with tech companies to stream their concerts live in virtual reality. The market for these virtuals concerts might seems fledgling now. But its prominence is growing.
Solo singers and bands like Kiss, Wiz Khalifa, Sean Paul, Five Finger Death Punch, Lewis Capaldi, The Kooks, The Streets, Rudimental, and Bullet for My Valentine have agreed to stream their upcoming concerts. Others like Fleet Foxes, Fall Out Boy, Jamiroquai, Kasabian, and The Who are also joining the rank.
The VR concert, while exciting for gadget lovers, is also highly beneficial for the artists. It helps them to eliminate the space limitation live concerts face. With VR streaming, the music industry could enlarge the number of audiences to include people outside of the concert venue.
Best of Both Worlds
This new streaming method would be very useful especially for famous singers and bands whose concert tickets are usually sold out minutes after they started selling it. VR concerts allow them to sell the concert experience to people who don’t get to buy the tickets.
After all, different from now-common video streaming which delivers only sound and images, VR would allow music fans to immerse in the concert excitement, whilst staying in their house. This explains why a VR concert could be a good substitution for the live music event.
VR concert, as Forbes summed it, combines the best of both worlds: the spontaneity and uniqueness of live music, with the accessibility of recorded music.
And don’t forget, all this convenience comes cheap. A typical virtual concert would only cost you around $8-$15.
Our Take
As Simon Chandler, a tech journalist mentioned, pop music is not just about the music. It is also about the crafted persona of the artists and how fans identify themselves with that persona.
By providing an immersive experience of the music event, the VR concert simply enhances the natural phenomenon we see in the relation between fans and an idol: to identify oneself with one’s idol and to be inspired by the idol.
This quest for inspiration is also the main factor behind the surge of influencer marketing these days.
VR concert is a part of the bigger VR field which is yet to bloom. Other important innovations, such as Facebook’s virtual world Horizon and the Oculus glasses, would continue to drive development in this field.
It is not unimaginable at all to think that one day, influencer marketing would utilize VR technology as well. And that indeed would boost marketers’ ability to deliver a personalize and compelling message to their potential customers.
For now, though, we should wait patiently for the infant field to continue growing. Or perhaps, wear our VR glass and enjoy Wiz Khalifa’s next concert!
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