Confirmation Presentation — Draft 7/8/21)
The aim of this presentation is to give the supervisor team the visual and audio based content, not found in the written confirmation document.
This will enable the supervisor team to devise questions and conversations and engage with the researcher on his work…
and it will be presented by an Avatar… which adds a meta layer to this presentation…. :)
8 long months have passed since the conformation document was written, the world has changed.. more research and more questions.. have been added.
How has the emergence of XR technology in the music industry affected how a Generation Z audience consumes a musical artists work?
The Agenda.. what we going to discuss and show… Part 1 will be a short video — presented by my Avatar
Part 1
1 — Generation Z — Meet the tribe
2 — Role of social media and Generation Z and its evolution to web3 and metaverse technology and the role of music within this transformation
3 — Technology and the recording music industry
4 — Virtual performance spaces and the research in this field
5 — Role of Netnography as my methodology of choice
Part 2 — will be presented by Mark Ashmore on Microsoft Teams
6 — Musical artists and this emerging space
7 — Documenting the research — journal entries / thesis draft outline / Virtual Djs / Virtual Gigs
8 — Sharing this knowledge and citation list + Q+A
1- Generation Z — Meet the tribe
In my written confirmation assessment, I wrote at great lengths regarding the state of research in the field of understanding Generation Z — and having looked back upon it while creating this presentation — I would say that this field is defiantly still emerging, and that the impact of almost 2 years of a global pandemic on this generation will become clear to academia in future research projects — and so for me, my focus has been to understand that their is a changing relationship between Generation Z and how they consume Music, how they discover music, its value, its role within their tribe and also how they attend musical gigs — from March 2020 to time of writing summer 2021 — musical ‘gigs’ inside social video game technology appears to out number physical gig attendance — this statement, will be part of my thesis, and if proved true — what affect does ‘the shift in the notion of what live performance is’ have on the music industry.
Another key takeaway from research into Generation Z was the role of screen time and the spaces they visit, the reasons why and what content is consumed and shared in these spaces — the research presented is now dated — and the researcher has shifted focus to the role of video games spaces such as Roblox and Fortnite and the emergence of Tik Tok as a social media platform within Generation Z circles.
Role of social media and Generation Z and its evolution to web3 and metaverse technology and the role of music within this transformation
Its difficult to explain the role of social media to people whom do not participate on the social media platforms? This has become evident, with conversations with my Supervisor team and elder academic peers.
and so, one of the major challenges of this thesis will be to communicate the emotional, artistic and community values of the various social media platforms, to an audience whom do not participate, or perhaps are users of say facebook and twitter — but have never seen Tik Tok or hung out on Discord.
Thus this experiment in presentation, I have opted for a more mixed media style approach to showing these new immersive virtual worlds and mixed social media reality spaces that Gen Z find themselves in, and this style will find itself in the finished thesis.
The methodology that I have chosen to present my research is Netnography, will enable me to bring my academic peer group inside my research project — and I will discuss more of this later.. but for now
I want to give an introduction to how music is used and the role is plays on various social media platforms lets look at the role of ‘Stories’ which is one of many applications built upon a users profile on most of the leading social media platforms.
Instagram — Stories — https://www.business2community.com/instagram/5-scientific-reasons-why-instagram-stories-are-so-engaging-02116732
Instagram — Music and Stories — https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-music-for-instagram-stories
Spotify — Music everything and is evolving into a social platform.
and they have a great R+D site — https://engineering.atspotify.com/
Tik Tok combines Video and Music — with Community
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/all-tik-tok-mashup
This is what is being shared and how music is being consumed https://www.tiktok.com/@esteban_turquie?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1
and the music clips (this one has 7 Million views, from feb 2021)
Rise of Tik Tok houses — https://www.kapwing.com/resources/tiktok-houses-list/
Technology and the recording music industry
From — https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/oldest-recordings/
Virtual performance spaces and the research in this field
Intro + 5.21 for Ariana Grande
VR Chat rave scene doco — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1wUg9HCODU&t=56s
Netnography
Example of…
3min of 3rd video..
END OF PART ONE…Thoughts
What my research is showing, is in my opinion, that a cultural shift is underway, with how Generation Z uses Virtual and Social media platforms to socialise and consume media.
This coupled with the perfect storm of a global lock down of IRL socialising caused by the global covid-19 pandemic , has led to a accelerated investment by technology firms such as Tik Tok, Instagram and Spotify into creating social music based technology applications on their platforms.
An increase in marketing spending, for example Tik Tok, sponsoring the Euro 2020 football championships (hosted in 2021) to grow the user base, this then amplifies and creates more subscriber's in the form of users willing to use it, share it and in some cases create a lifestyle out of it, as we have seen with Tik Tok houses and instagram influencers.
This is happening at the same time as both Fortnite and Roblox, with over half a billion registered users between them have started to host gigs with artists that strategically converge Generation Z (and their social media accounts), with top rated spotify artists and social media influencers into a social video game space — effectively making unique music based immersive experiments which have no IRL equivalent, is it a video game, a music video, a gig, a hybrid of all 3, or something entirely unique and new? — we know this new musical experience can only exist because of the XR technologies used to create them and a digital native Generation Z audience willing to participate, and know how to participate, and understand their role…and not only participate, but SHARE the experience with others via #hashtags , stories and posts in the form of video, text, audio or emojis… — these are music experiences, for a globally connected, diverse, media literate and digital native audience — who have been TOLD not to leave the house without a vaccine!
To me this clearly demonstrates that we have moved to a new age for the music industry and one that has been driven by XR technology and accelerated by a global lockdown of IRL music experiences.
this is of course my hypothesis and one that I will explore in my thesis.
Musical artists and this emerging space + Documenting the research — journal entries / thesis draft outline / Virtual Djs / Virtual Gigs
Presented in person by Mark Ashmore — with Q+A
