Croquet 2 Play

With online social networking at an all-time high, the music industry increasingly is turning to the next stage of the user-generated content phenomenon–the virtual world.

“MySpace is about promoting who you are to a broad community to find people with similar interests,” says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing for Interscope Records, who greenlighted the Pussycat Dolls Lounge. “This is the next step–take those people that have found that common interest and give them another level of communication. Once you’ve committed to being a fan, how much deeper are you going to go?”

Holt and others in the music industry hope it will be deep enough to buy products…. The lounge is not alone in the virtual world. Last year, a similar community called the Habbo Hotel began hosting virtual visits by such acts as Gorillaz, Ashlee Simpson and Bow Wow.

ZDNet: Virtual venues create real dollars

In 1995 when Warner Bros. Black Music Division was about to release The Gold Experience CD by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, I was hired as an outside consultant to develop their website. I wanted to use Virtus Walkthrough(developed by David Smith, one of the Croquet architects) to implement a virtual world architecture I’d previously implemented in Smalltalk/V for Windows, but there wasn’t room in the budget or schedule to bring that off. With help from The Graphics Artist Still Known As JC we were able to implement a virtual space with a club, a church for gospel music and the [insert unpronounceable symbol] Cafe. Given the politics of the time, the Cafe ended up isolated from the rest of the Black Music Divsion buildings - see low-res image I was able to snag from the web archives:
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Nevertheless, we learned a lot from that um experience which when combined with what’s being done in MMORPGs and Second Life could be quite valuable especially for folks thinking about dropping $25K - $3M into virtual world development:

1. Virtual venues as marketing gimmicks won’t really work - they need to have deeper integration with business processes.
2. The economic upside isn’t in selling more records, tshirts or other stuff, but rather in creating the compelling, thriving locations for user-generated content.
3. There are important relationships between real world locations and those in virtual space