I saw a post on the official forums from Turnbuckle Jornsburg, the post can be read here. Now I was a bit wary of the link, as it’s a shortened one for a start and nobody had replied to the post. The post itself says:
“Hey there’s a new vid up on TEDx with a guy performing both live and in a cafe in Second Life.”
Now I was intrigued, so I found the TEDx website, with their mission goal of Ideas Worth Spreading. There was nothing obvious on the main page but there was link to the TEDx youTube channel. There I found a video entitled: Music in Second Life: Jonah Bernstein (feat. Lulu Healy) at TEDxHalifax.
The video starts with Jonah talking about being a thirty four year old synth pop musician with a day job and how this is a problem because he can’t pack his music gear into his car and go playing all over the country and then he reveals a partial solution, after discovering Second Life.
He explains how Second Life is where you create a slightly better looking avatar than yourself and meet better looking people. Now I must admit that I have no idea how old this video is, the viewer shown in the video looks like an old one but the video was only published on TEDx today, so maybe it’s an old one just put up or maybe it’s a newer one. However that’s not the point really, the talk on usage of Second Life for music and marketing is still relevant.
Jonah highlights some of the advantages of Second Life, the huge amount of GDP that makes up the Second Life world and why Second Life is good for marketing. He talks of how you can fly, which may sound shallow but it’s also something I heard from Gene Roddenberry Jr when he gave a talk in Second Life, he thought flying was a great concept, I think once you’ve been in Second Life a while that flying doesn’t grab you anymore, but it’s interesting that some find it so important.
Jonah also talks of how marketing in Second Life is easy and instantaeous. I don’t quite agree there, it is easy to get a logo into Second Life for many of us, but marketing said banner is a bit of a tougher task.
Jonah then touches upon an issue of many virtual worlds, is it real? He comes to the conclusion, and one I agree with, that it is real. I mean in some scenarios we do have a Wizard of Oz the man behind the curtain thing going on, but the person behind the avatar is real and the money being traded around is real in many ways, even if Linden Dollars are only virtual tokens.
As I said earlier, I’m not sure when this video was recorded but I’ll embed it here, it’s over thirteen minutes long, although some of that does include the music of Jonah Bernstein (featuring Lulu Healy), it’s an interesting look at good use of Second Life.