✖️ Who will you be in a world of avatars? And will you be in control of that identity?
And: Brands experimenting in Web3; How to build a DAO; AI music metadata revolutionizing sync; The inconvenience of going to concerts in your 60s; Intentional churn; Music connecting the hyperverse
There’s no escaping the fact that more and more of our lives become digital. We end up in video calls, spend our time on social media or in digital workspaces. We may not always realize it, but we are already building out our digital selves in each of these interactions. This digital world is now popularly referred to as the metaverse, or the hyperverse. The distinction between these two rests on whether you believe that a metaverse will in itself be interoperable, or that various metaverse will eventually link together in something more complex - a hyperverse. This question of interoperability also defines the question of identity in these digital worlds that we build. Say you’re a certain character in League of Legends, but a completely different person in Minecraft. Bringing these worlds - and this moves far beyond games - and the identities we craft in them together is a question of technology, but also a question of ontology and phenomenology.
The beauty of online worlds and communities is that you can find different modes of expression. This can be beautiful, obnoxious, useful, and ugly and in that sense digital worlds reflect our lived experiences in analog worlds. That said, we have a strong influence on who our avatar will be as we construct them in a metaverse ecosystem. On the one hand, this will mean that we can create a digital self that has the potential to be better than our analog self. While this reeks of Web2 social media where Instagram filters make everything look better, the social interdependency of digital worlds provide a very different meaning to what ‘better’ means in this case. On the other hand, the ability to become someone else means it’s much easier to tap into the worst parts of your identity while you hide behind a mask. Again, there’s a parallel to Web2 social media, where Twitter can seem like a pit of the most awful parts of human life. Where this becomes interesting is when an ecosystem focuses on collaboration which should create a system of social checks.
So what are we talking about here? Is it the big experiences of Lil Nas X in Roblox or Ariana Grande in Fortnite? Or is it the more bottom-up building done when people rebuild a club in Minecraft? In each of these ‘worlds’ people create avatars that can reflect their identity, or be a totally different expression of their selves. The question is whether we all want to take those identities from one ecosystem to the next? Maybe we want to be somebody completely different in Roblox than we are in Decentraland? Maybe in one world we showcase a more true reflection of how we see ourselves while in another we are a frog with an attitude?
There’s an issue here that affects how you decide who you will be in a metaverse - who controls the identity that you create? So far, the answer has always been a centralized entity. However, new technologies allow for a change that provides control of identity and make it portable. Remember zero knowledge proofs? This technique of verifying data without revealing any personal information is instrumental here. It leads to something called Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Basically, it’s an ID that you take with you through digital worlds. The concept, interestingly for a music industry audience, stems from a peer-to-peer network idea from Carl Ellison about a public key to identity shared within a network. SSI allows people, or users, to have access to their identity data, control this data, take it with them, and to live within transparent networks.
The above is not a meme, but in a world of metaverses that aren’t currently interoperable it’s prevalent. Can we even expect to have an SSI if the networks in which we live are not transparent? How do we, as users, builders, or players, push for open worlds that interact with one another?
Going back to one of the benefits of interacting in a virtual world as an avatar is that can give you enough distance from yourself to actually be more like yourself. As I mentioned at the start, this is also a question of ontology, of being. To confirm that being to yourself and then to a broader world means that this identity can potentially develop beyond a singular digital ecosystem and into a broader metaverse, or hyperverse. Taking your digital identity with you can thus become a key feature of your future self. Start thinking about who you want to be now.
LINKS
🔍 High Fidelity: How Can Advancements in AI Music Metadata Revolutionize Sync? (Ben Gilbert)
“Two other companies that specialize in MIR (music information retrieval) are AIMS and Cyanite, who use AI music tagging – adding descriptive metadata identifiers to songs – and sonic similarity – search functionality that enhances the discoverability of material with matching audio characteristics – to extract value from catalogs. The use case scenarios here are multiple. Music rights holders can deploy the technology to tag vast collections, maximizing their assets and monetizing not just the hits but every song. It also promises to be an incredibly powerful tool for sync and music licensing, particularly during a time when demand is exploding across the entertainment sector and beyond.”
🖇️ Practical Lessons from Building a DAO (Peter Yang)
“DAOs, like companies, should exist to:
Create useful products and services for customers.
Be a great place to work for community members.
Build a sustainable business.
Everything else - tokens, governance votes, treasury management, etc - should simply be a means toward the goals above.”
If you’re interested in music DAOs more specifically, Bas was part of a great Spaces yesterday with his new ColorsxDAO initiative. Check out the recording here.
👵 The Inconveniences of Going to Concerts in Your 60s (Ryan Dyer)
“The following is an editorial inspired by an interview with my mom, an elder rocker, on the pains of going to concerts when hitting those later years. It’s written from her point of view, to give you a ground-level look into her life loving metal in her 60s.”
🌌 Music Will Be the Gravitational Force Driving the Hyperverse (Jesse Kirshbaum & Clayton Durant)
“Not only can music connect branded virtual worlds at scale, but it will also create new opportunities for marketers to interact and engage with consumers in the hyperverse. We spoke with brand marketers and executives who suggested three ways in which music’s synergy across the hyperverse will influence marketing strategy in virtual worlds.”
🤔 Transitional Communities and intentional churn… (Fancy, Eliot & Dwayne)
“So when thinking about intentional churn, it’s important to build a framework for off-boarding and re-onboarding members rather than excluding or punishing members. It means outlining the metrics you want to define for your MVEs [ed. note: minimum viable expectation] and digging deeply into what behaviors you want your Community to be propagating.”
⚗️ How Brands Are Experimenting with Web3 (Ana Andjelic)
“In this article, I examine how three different approaches to Web3 — virtual products, hybrid products, and decentralized ownership — can deliver immediate business value. By experimenting with each, brands can take advantage of this new era of the internet to amplify and diversify their digital footprint.”
MUSIC
My music listening has been all over the place this last week. Moving from destructive grindcore sounds to ethereal choir music, I’ve heard it all. What I’d like to share sits somewhere in the middle - Hatis Noit just released a new video for her track Aura. Not only is it a beautiful yet slightly disconcerting piece of music, the video is a treat. Moreover, it was created by Yuma Kishi and his A.I who provide a visual layer of dissociation that complements the music extremely well.