Looking Back at Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival 2022

Looking back at the second Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival, one can’t help but remember the exhilarating feeling pulsing through the crowd at the end of the festival’s last day. As a sunrise colored the sky in pinks and purples over Björk’s main stage performance, Decentraland’s community experienced the phenomenon of one of the virtual world’s first ever rainfalls, together.

The shared experience was a magical moment for anyone present, and one that left no doubt that #DCLMVMF22, as a whole, was a success. The main goals of the event were to entertain and empower the Decentraland community, add new content to the platform, and spread awareness about Decentraland while introducing new users to the world. The massive 4-day music fest that resulted definitely checked those boxes!

Amazing Content Brought to You by the Power of Decentralization

It’s truly impressive what the Decentraland community, Foundation, and partners accomplished together, bringing Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival into being. While other similar events are put together by content teams numbering in the hundreds, only ~20 Decentraland Foundation team members were directly involved in organizing DCLMVMF. Together with funding from presenting partner Kraken, the four-day festival was made possible by the power of decentralization! It was the enthusiasm, hard work, and amazing content produced by Decentraland’s inspiring community and partners that made DCLMVMF such a success. Everyone involved should feel proud of themselves!

Amazing Artists

This year’s Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival was more than twice as big as last year’s with over 200 musical artists representing all major genres. Among those 200+ were huge names such as Björk, Ozzy Osbourne, Souljaboy, Dillon Fancis, Atarashii Gakko!, Breland, Izzu Bizu, Akira the Don, and many more as well as countless members of the Decentraland community. More accessible than ever before, a global audience could enjoy these talents for free, from their browser, with no VR headset required.

Spectacular Sites

In addition to a star-studded line up, the festival grounds of DCLMVMF, criss-crossed by enormous, glittering arched pathways, were double the size of last year’s venue. Music Plaza, a new Decentraland location with the festival’s enormous Main Stage at its center, was installed across from the preexisting Festival Land and allowed this year’s event to boast 15+ otherworldly stages as well as numerous Experiences. Not limited to the physical restraints of the real world, stages at DCLMVMF were something to behold, from Ozzfest’s spooky castle, complete with a giant skeleton bat guardian, to MetaTokyo’s colorfully intense venue overlooked by an enormous dancing doll.

Exciting Experiences

Diverse and original, DCLMVMF’s many experiences offered festival-goers an alternate pastime to partying stageside and added much to the festival experience. Some of the most memorable were NBC’s gamified ‘The Voice’ experience in which fans would collect music notes to the beat of a song in order to get the show’s sought after chair turn and collect an exclusive Wearable; ‘The Tower of Babel’ experience which featured a serenely dark room in which visitors would be surrounded by fluttering butterflies as the multilingual voices of 38 Decentraland community members wove through the space; and the intriguing ‘Follow the White Rabbit’ experience which spontaneously beckoned users to chase a cyberpunk girl through the festival venue on each of the event’s four days, leaving you wondering when and where she’d pop up next.

One of the main goals of Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival was to both entertain and empower the Decentraland community. Judging by the huge spike in #Decentraland and #DCLMVMF22 mentions on Twitter accompanied by clips of happily Emoting community members, it’s safe to say that this year’s festival was a great experience for DCL citizens.

Wow! @Decentraland – an incredible festival! Standouts for me were the @bjork show (transcendental!) and TRU and Techno stages! Shout out to the DCL Fam who made sure the community was represented @teenybod @Uniquehorns_nft @TheDFreshmaker @FrankyNeedles @multinft and more! pic.twitter.com/hTRdeyJ7mD

— Tangpoko.eth (@tangpoko) November 14, 2022

In terms of empowerment, the festival provided many opportunities for community members to take matters into their own hands and show the world what they and Decentraland had to offer. It was community members who organized some of the festival’s most popular and exciting stages, OG Community and TRU Band Room, which even featured some DCL-native artists, such as Cromulon, SharkAnth0ny, Harrison First, Serena Elis, Jack Frost, and many more. As for community Creators, they were able to display their festival-themed Wearables and Emotes in a DCLMVMF-dedicated tab of the Marketplace, creating an easy one-stop shop for festival-goers to find their music festival necessities.

Community-created Wearables specifically got a huge boost thanks to the festival with over 3K Wearables sold over the 4 days. Even more free Wearables were claimed during the event with countless airdrops and many freebie offers totalling to an impressive 139.2K of free minted Wearables collected.

#DCLMVMF22 Emote Contest Winners 🎖️

And the 1st place winner is…

Waving Dance submitted by @Kinetix_studio! https://t.co/O2F9cuFk2x

See all winning Emotes 👇 pic.twitter.com/gNqVC5uAXV

— Decentraland (@decentraland) November 4, 2022

And of course, one must mention that community-created Emotes, only recently opened up to the creator market, were essential to making the DCLMVMF experience what it was. All throughout the festival sick dance moves, excited hugs, crowd surfing, and wild air-guitar solos could be seen, all thanks to community Emotes. There was even an official DCLMVMF Emote, Waving Dance created by community member Kinetix, that was selected from an earlier Emote contest!

Decentraland Moves Forward

The last measure of DCLMVMF22’s success was whether the event helped to spread awareness of Decentraland, introduce new users to the platform, and if it brought new content to the world. In terms of numbers, the event was covered by numerous news outlets resulting in 8.67M views of total media coverage and reached a social media audience of 77M.

Having talent such as Björk, Ozzy Osbourne, Souljaboy, and others involved in the event also helped word of Decentraland to reach new audiences. New audiences mean new users—on the first day of the festival, over 50% of logins were new users! As for overall festival attendance, despite the bear market and general reduced hype of Web3 in the mainstream compared to the same time last year, the festival still managed to maintain approximately the same attendance numbers as last year’s festival when using the same measuring metrics.

DCLMVMF as a whole was a great opportunity for Decentraland to grow as a world and as a platform. Many of the experiences and stages built for the event, the entirety of Music Plaza, will stay up for at least the next year. Not only will this offer new venues for prospective event organizers, but there is also the prospect of future events and concerts from partners that participated in the festival such as Ozzfest, Limewire, MetaTokyo, and others as they use their stages throughout 2023.

The festival also happened to coincide with the release of some new DCL features, allowing them to really shine as the community experienced them all together. The new Channels feature, which allows you to communicate in topic-specific chats with anyone in-world, regardless of where they are, ended up being incredibly useful during the festival. Not only did it mean that newcomers looking for help could easily get it, but the general DCLMVMF channel helped boost the overall feeling of community and togetherness during the festival as all festival-goers could chat with each other, regardless of which realm they were in or what stage they were at.

Fuel for the Future

Not to be overlooked, Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival had value in serving as an example to the world of the potential of metaverses and as inspiration for opportunities that are even now still unfulfilled, just waiting for someone to be the first to do them. Virtual worlds like Decentraland offer a global platform, free from physical and creative limitations, that is open to everyone. The potential is staggering!

In a place like Decentraland, no one is held back by distance, pandemic lockdowns, physical disabilities, or financial means. Decentraland invites anyone with an internet connection to come  and make and experience awesome things together. In terms of the music industry, while nothing can replace the experience of going to a live concert in person (and that is not the goal of events like DCLMVMF), platforms like Decentraland offer new ways for artists to connect with their fans and new ways to express their creativity.

In these current times, when ticket prices for concerts can count in the thousands, metaverse events could help artists become more accessible to their fans, especially for those with physical or financial limitations. Concerts, meet-n-greets, or Q&A sessions could all be easily arranged in the metaverse, helping artists form stronger ties with their fans. Creatively, there are no limitations in the metaverse either. Stage design, performances, and appearances can be completely customized to an artist’s vision. As artists always tend to be the ones pushing boundaries, it is exciting to imagine what they will do next in a place where the possibilities are limitless. The metaverse is waiting.

See you at Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival 2023!