Decentraland’s Vegas City area, where Lickd is offering users access to music from Empire and Kobalt. Photo Credit: Lickd
UGC music licensing platform Lickd has announced a deal to bring the catalogs of Kobalt and Empire to the metaverse as part of a tie-up with Decentraland.
Lickd, Kobalt, and Empire formally unveiled their partnership with three-year-old Decentraland (billed by its developers as an all-encompassing “virtual world that will grow beyond any centralized control”) today.
Under the newly inked “milestone” pact, London-headquartered Lickd – which is backed by Warner Music, itself a major investor in and proponent of emerging platforms – has created a music player called Chorus. And it’s through Chorus that Decentraland users will have access to “thousands of hours of music” from Kobalt and Empire, higher-ups communicated.
Equipped with both background and “featured” tracks, Chorus is “available across all venues and public spaces” within the metaverse world’s Vegas City district, Lickd relayed, and is “delivering hundreds of genre and mood specific playlists into the city’s attractions.”
Additionally, seven-year-old Lickd disclosed that the Decentraland partnership likewise extends to Vegas City’s LaLigaLand, a “zone” that centers on the namesake Spanish soccer league. In said zone, Lickd indicated that it will work “to bridge the entertainment worlds of music and sport.”
Addressing the deal in a statement, Lickd co-founder and CEO Paul Sampson touted the metaverse’s perceived long-term commercial potential for the music industry.
“At the heart of everything we do at Lickd is innovation and the synergies between what we, EMPIRE and Kobalt all envisaged being the scalable opportunity for music in the metaverse were clear,” the former Cuesongs exec Sampson communicated in part. “They agreed that the industry needs to act quickly and decisively to capitalise on that opportunity… The growing popularity of the metaverse is inevitable and we continue to lead by example and deliver new offerings to our partners, customers and metaverse users alike.”
Notwithstanding this glowing assessment, others have offered comparatively skeptical views of the metaverse’s viability moving forward. In any event, the drawbacks of inking (carefully structured) licensing deals appear few and far between on the music side.
And in related news, December saw Mariah Carey offer a performance (as well as a number of digital items) to Roblox users, while The Sandbox developer Animoca Brands that same month purchased a majority stake in Pixelynx, a deadmau5-founded “music metaverse gaming platform.”
More recently, Saweetie invited diehard supporters to attend an Intuit-sponsored Super Bowl concert in Roblox, and the function, described as “an official part of the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII event line-up,” took place in Warner Music’s Rhythm City.