The metaverse may be the next big thing in the music world. Cheddar News’ Michelle Castillo sat down with Jon Vlassopulos, VP and head of music at Roblox, to discuss virtual concerts and more. 

Between Bells

Music in the Metaverse

and between bells back on this friday everyone. So the place to go to for music is it the metaverse. Well, companies like Fortnite, Minecraft and Roadblocks are now expanding their music partnerships and they're bringing performances now to their platforms, creating interactive experiences that they promised to heighten that fan to artist connection are Michelle castello, sat down with john Villa Sarpolus, the vice president and head of music over at roadblocks for more in their upcoming concert. They have with artists 24 K gold in take a look. Yeah, no thanks for having me. So we're excited. He is a fantastically talented artist who also grew up playing on on road blocks. So he's decided to host his, his first virtual concert on the platform and he'll be playing a bunch of his hits mood and also breaking his new single and playing it for the first time in my head on the platform, you know, 24 K Golden is such a pandemic success story. He really took off on Tiktok and I understand why roadblocks moved into the concert space during the pandemic, but why continue concerts in roadblocks when we can gather in person. Yeah, so so again, I think concerts for us, we're we're already being worked on pre pandemic. The platform is all about millions and millions of people coming together every day for play for fun in the future for education for work. So music events were in the real world, people come together, we felt was a natural extension of the platform where we could bring people together around music and obviously during the pandemic, they couldn't come together. But even after the pandemic concerts are still quite an elite experience. So only a tiny percentage of people actually can afford to go to a live concert, maybe have a artists performing in their town um or or city or they're of an age where they can go. Um So the great thing in the metaverse is an artist may have to travel around the world, you know, for a year to reach the same amount of people that can reach millions of people on their platforms at roadblocks on a weekend. So we, we feel there will be an intertwining of of kind of live and, and virtual moving forward to, to offer artists a chance to, to play the more people and fans to connect with more artists that they love now is the goal to compete against the live concert experience. Is that where you're gonna be? Is that your biggest competition? Absolutely not. No, I think we see it's an enhancement. So if you imagine you, you get a ticket to your favorite show in the real world, usually maybe you convince one of your friends too to go along with you and then you have a little bit of a lull leading up to maybe a month later, two months later before the show and then you have the live event that you go to and then you have kind of a sugar sugar crash and you go home after you have the fun of the, of the concert, I think with the marrying of the two worlds, maybe when you buy the ticket, you get a virtual ticket, you know, at the same time and you get to go to the virtual artists place on roadblocks, meet other fans from your area from around the world and kind of get that excitement building, you know, up to the main show and then maybe at the main show you're seeing screens of people tuning in from the universe, Maybe there's like a live tent for access to a kind of virtual fans and then the fun thing after the show, in the real world, the fun continues, you know, in the, in the virtual space with the art system, maybe follow wherever the artist is going after that philadelphia and new york and then internationally, so I think it, it elongates and, and deepens the relationship of live tours by having a kind of a virtual overlay. Um and then additionally, I think, you know, a lot of artists are considering having a virtual stop, you know, again on their physical tours. So I think the two worlds will become more intertwined. Now I saw some of the cool things you could do with 24K. Golden, there were some pre things that you could unlock before the actual concert. So what can you do with the music and the metaverse that you really can't do in real life for a performance like this? Yes. So all, all we're trying to, to your point make the metaverse even even better in some cases than than than real life. So a concert is usually formulaic in the real world, you go and you stand and you clap in your chair and then you leave and there's maybe merch that you can buy. So in the metaverse we can have these very immersive, engaging interactive participatory experiences where there's as you said quests and games like before the event and around the event unlocking some exclusive items we can, you know, you'll see virtual kind of meet and greets, live chats that Golden will be doing and but the virtual meet and greets are super fun. We've done a bunch of those with other artists like um poppin around the brits activation we did where like glass animals pop on the platform and if you're one of the lucky people that gets to hang in that server, you can chat directly with the band and they're taking avatar selfies. So for our fans who are spending hours on the platform every day for them, it's kind of like real life. So it's it's it's super meaningful and those are that you know sort of money can't buy experiences that were telling their friends about for years that they would probably never get to do in the in the real world and our thanks to Michelle Stelio for that interview