Gaming Is Taking Over Music As Gen Z's Cultural Hub

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Gaming Is Taking Over Music As Gen Z's Cultural Hub
Photo by Decerry Donato

Dmitri Vietze launched the first Music Tectonics in 2019 to explore how web3, NFTs and the metaverse are shifting the music landscape.

“I realized there was nothing like this that was focused on music tech or music innovation on the West Coast or in the L.A. area,” Vietze told dot.LA.

On Wednesday, the 4th annual Music Tectonics conference kicked off at the Loews hotel in Santa Monica. Guests included TikTok’s Head of Music Corey Sheridan, YouTube’s Head of Music Sanjay Amin, SoundCloud’s Global Vice President of Marketing Manny Toro and Sony Ventures’ Managing Director Joseph Tou.

Here are some of the most important takeaways:


The music industry can learn a thing or two from the gaming industry.

“Instead of designing the music for gaming, we should design it for internet culture and internet communities,” said head of Spotify innovation Máuhan Zonoozy. “Technology is the Z access for music, it drives growth and innovation. Gaming is simply another content format that was designed a little bit more strategically to take advantage of that.”

NFTs are bringing artists and fans closer together.

According to CrossBorderWorks founder and CEO Vickie Nauman, fans will pay for NFTs or tokens that are associated with their favorite artists because they want access and they want to be part of the club.

“They [fans] want to have those collectibles and when I think about our industry when we moved from album sales, and mp3 downloads into streaming models, we kind of eliminated the top of the pyramid of really high value, scarce goods, except for live music,” Nauman continued. “And I think that web3 has the capability of recreating those high value scarce goods that music fans love. And so I think that we can create a new class of monetization in web3 that we just don't have right now.”

Music is needed for video content to thrive.

“We published a study a few years ago that showed that 85% of videos on YouTube contain at least 10 seconds of music,” said Pex COO Amadea Choplin. Her point being that, video on its own, isn’t very engaging. She added that, “music is absolutely fundamental to making a content pop, to make and people relate to it, want to watch it, engage with it, comment on it, and share it.”

It’s in the best interest of platforms to handle distribution so creators can focus on creating content.

“The handling of all of the logistics that we're placing on creators and songwriters, frankly, is just not in their best interest,” said Choplin. “So we're really focused on making that a very seamless system and expanding the network of platforms that pay creators and songwriters because it shouldn't be just one or two platforms that are paying them, it should be every single platform out there.”

Ecommerce will be the next big thing for video and music content.

“Candidly speaking, in the West, societal behavior is not quite there yet where people are used to consuming short-form videos and then being inspired to make a purchase,” said TikTok head of music Corey Sheridan. “When we look to the East and look at behaviors, particularly in China, it is a massive multi-billion-dollar industry. So that is going to be the next phase.”

The metaverse is in its early stages and the barrier to entry must be accessible in order for people to trust its utility.

According to Seven20 founder and CEO Dean Wilson, 20 years ago, everyone looked at you like you had five heads if you said we link credit cards on the computer when you buy stuff online. “But now we trust it and now we have our phones and when we walk up to a machine and tap it, we get annoyed if we can't do that anymore,” Wilson continued. “As an industry that’s where we have to go."

An earlier version listed Dmitri's last name incorrectly.

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

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https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Why Tax Knowledge Is Her ‘Superpower’

Yasmin Nouri

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‘Expand Past the Stage’: How These LA-based Ticketing Platforms are Using The Metaverse to Take On Ticketmaster

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

‘Expand Past the Stage’: How These LA-based Ticketing Platforms are Using The Metaverse to Take On Ticketmaster
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. First and foremost, with Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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