Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne is set to perform at a key metaverse festival along with some of the world’s biggest artists, it was revealed last week.
In a tweet, top metaverse platform Decentraland announced it would open the Metaverse Music Festival 2022, a novel platform hosting over 100 artists, including the Godfather of Heavy Metal, rap superstar Soulja Boy, and electronic music icon Dillon Francis, among many others.
Announcing Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival 2022 🤘
🗓️ Nov 10-13📍15 unique stages🎵100+ artists across all genres, including @OzzyOsbourne, @DillonFrancis, @souljaboy and more!🎟️ Free for all to attend🐙 Presented by @krakenfx #DCLMVMF22 https://t.co/GYefV5JXW6.
— Decentraland (@decentraland) October 17, 2022
Decentraland will host the festival’s second annual gathering from 10 to 13 November and plans to announce further artists over the next few weeks.
The festival has also partnered with cryptocurrency platform Kraken, is completely free to attend and is viewable across smartphones, tablets, PCs as well as immersive headsets.
According to the website, the festival is “set in an otherworldly cyberpunk landscape being reclaimed by nature,” adding it would feature 15 “uniquely designed stages” for the massive lineup of artists.
The Metaverse and Music: The Perfect Marriage?
Speaking to Billboard in an exclusive interview, Sam Hamilton, Creative Director at Decentraland Foundation, explained how Decentaland’s decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) governance system allows it greater freedoms for its shareholders to design, buy, and sell.
He said,
“The big difference is philosophy. We believe that the user should not be the product, but should own and direct the product”
Speaking further, he explained that his company was “working hard to catch up with the hype” from other platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite, which held larger shares of monthly active users.
Currently, Decentraland hosts roughly 60,000 MAUs compared to Roblox and Fortnite’s tens of millions. Hamilton continued, stating that the platform “needed longer to build out a better platform” but that “the hype [of 2021] came too quickly.”
The Metaverse was “inevitable” and was “definitely happening,” Hamilton concluded in the interview.
Rise of the Web3 Musician
The news comes amid a series of major collaborations with metaverse platforms, leading to large-scale promotions of emerging technologies.
The MTV Music Awards were the first to both open a category for ‘Best Metaverse Performance’ and host an immersive video performance with hip hop heavyweights Snoop Dogg and Eminem. The show featured the rappers as Bored Ape avatars with real-time 3D face and body tracking.
Top artists such as MUSE, Foo Fighters, Dave Guetta, Steve Aoki, Ariana Grande, 22Gz, Deadmau5, and many others have hosted music videos and live performances across metaverse platforms, sparking interest in using immersive technologies for entertainment purposes.
