As something of a music obsessive in RL, I’m always curious to explore what Second Life has to offer on that front. I have to confess my early experiences were disappointing, as many of the venues I came across seemed to regard the music as an incidental (mainstream rock/commercial hiphop) soundtrack to the performances of the exotic dancers. Each to their own, but really, there’s only so many times I want to hear “Back in Black” or “Milkshake” while a nice young lady shakes her tassles at me.
It was probably at the SecondFest Dance Tent a few weeks ago that I picked up a few useful pointers, either by looking at attendees’ profiles or chatting to people (or eavesdropping their chat with others – look, I’m still quite shy about talking to strangers, you know!). And since then I’ve discovered quite an enthusiastic SL community interested in electronic music of various forms, centred mainly around a few club venues (e.g. The FAC, Trash Palace, Club Vega, Club SH-3103, the Vibration Institute, and the tiny but great Alpha Box, and probably more that I’m forgetting to mention) – and also visible on the Web, through MySpace and through dedicated Web sites (e.g. The FAC, Trash Palace, Club Vega @ MySpace, Club SH-3013 @ MySpace, the Vibration Institute).
In contrast to Art’s experience at the SL Hacienda, my visits to the venues above have been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive (though as I commented in reply to Art’s post, scheduling a “event” to test voice chat in another community’s space that is primarily designed for music does seem a little bit cheeky to me!).
Some venues have one or two avatars on duty as “greeters”, so you’ll probably get a “Hi avatar” shout when you arrive (or indeed more often than not, other people will greet you anyway), but after that it’s really up to you how much you choose to interact with other participants by chat or IM. On occasions, I have just opted to click the dance ball and “camp” there quietly at the back of the room and treat it much like any Web radio stream, leaving SL in the background while I spar on ILX or read Stylus or whittle down my fortnightly Boomkat shopping basket in another window (checking back occasionally to see if anyone has been trying to talk to me!).
But a recent post by John von Seggern (SL: Johnvon Watanabe, co-owner of the aforementioned Vibration Institute (which also operates as a NetLabel outside SL)) and J LeRoy titled “The Significance of Music in Second Life” articulates quite nicely what it seems to me really makes these experiences quite compelling:
While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one’s own recent music purchases or of a live concert.
But in SL:
As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his (sic) performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.
In our opinion, the creation of virtual social spaces like Second Life where music can be shared and experienced together is a development of potentially huge import for the future of music, adding a major new dimension to what we’ve seen so far with music on the Internet.
These SL events offer the opportunity for a real-time conversation – and one in which not only the audience, but also the artist or DJ, can participate. And indeed I’ve come to realise that often in the venues above one of the avatars in the audience turns out to be a performer or DJ in another venue, or at the same venue on another night. This is a very different sort of event from something like SecondFest where many of the “performances” – not all of them, but many of them, at least by the “major artists” – were pre-recorded streams piped into SL. In contrast, these club spaces are, AFAICT, very much “grassroots” initiatives.
They are highly cosmopolitan spaces too, and although it’s probably true that English tends to be the dominant lingua franca, you’re quite likely to find yourself in the middle of conversations in German, Italian, Dutch or French.
Now, sure, some of that chat is limited to exclamations of “Tune!” or jokey banter between attendees who are acquainted with each other. But – in the best sessions, at least – there is also a sense of a genuine excitement and enthusiasm for music in these places, and there is a real social, communal dimension to listening. In the past I’ve joined in “synchronised listens” on Web-based music message boards, where members arrange to play the same records at home at the same time and post messages along the way, or I’ve joined in threads during live TV broadcasts of events like Glastonbury (I drew the line at Live Earth, and did my bit to combat climate change by leaving the TV switched off for the day), and a DJ friend of mine runs a Web chat room during his show.
But the “presence” factor provided by virtual worlds like SL seems to offer more than any of those, albeit in ways I can’t always put my finger on.
One of the SL sessions I particularly enjoyed recently, though I only caught a small part of it, was a DJ set by Transient Zeluco in Alpha Box where he played a very varied set of tracks entirely from NetLabels (and so mostly available as free downloads, under open licenses) and also posted a hyperlinked set list on the Web, so that you could follow up on anything you enjoyed and obtain mp3s of tracks there and then, see what else the labels were releasing, read about the artists, and so on. Some SL clubs even have in-world mp3 vending machines.
In this sort of context, it seems to me, music in Second Life becomes an integral part of that continuum that includes the blogosphere, MySpace, Flickr, Last.FM, file-sharing networks, Web radio streams, and more, and yet it also brings something new and different and, as Johnvon stresses, above all social and shared, to that mix.
P.S. I should probably mention that if you visit the venues above at random, then there’s a good chance that you’ll find them empty and streaming a radio station and you’ll wonder what on earth I’m getting excited about. They tend to fill up only when a live DJ or artist is performing. Sometimes those performances are programmed on some sort of regular schedule or advertised in advance (e.g. via MySpace pages), but quite often they seem to be organised or at least advertised at relatively short notice, so joining the in-world groups is the best way to keep up.
P.P.S. Oh, and if you don’t like house and techno, then, TBH, the venues above probably aren’t for you, but I’m sure there’s an SL venue for the genre of your preference somewhere out there.
