How Fortnite Might Have Shown us the Future of Music Events
Games might be the key to the future of music industry revenues
I don’t know who Travis Scott is, and to be honest, I do not care, but I found mind-blowing that Epic Games hosted a live concert into its main platform Fortnite.
Yes, Fortnite! The popular Epic Games product that mixes First-person-shooter, battle royale and Minecraft to engage millions of people… the thing that matters is that Fortnite has tens of millions of active players and should be considered a platform to drive entertainment at more than just a game scale.
Before dismissing this information as not worthy of your attention, spend some minute and watch the video of the psychedelic event:
I think it was very well designed. The audio and visuals during the event provided an increasing intensity towards the end climax, in an orgasm of colors and sounds… And people were PART of it. It was not just watching something, it was being part of something.
It happened during COVID-19 with most people under shelter at home directives… and it delivered.
The music industry has been reinventing itself since “Napster”, where the traditional model of “selling music” has been disrupted entirely and the market was forced to learn how to leverage music as experience the hard way.
I’ve been advocating the merge between games and traditional movie industry for a while (eg. deepfakes as a technology to merge games and movies) but I never thought about the music events, the music industry and I didn’t foresee this kind of event happening, not in this time frame. Maybe COVID-19 helped in shortening the time-to-market and I’m glad for it. This event was massive, big enough to not be unnoticed by the media industry. Think about it, the ideal target for the music industry is the teenagers and below, and this was maybe the most targeted campaign they could have made in their whole history. This might be the beginning of collaborations between the music industry and open digital worlds.
What times to be alive!
