Hear the Music, Avoid the Mosh Pit

Second Life's basic membership is free after downloading software from the Web site, http://www.secondlife.com , which provides tools to create an avatar. The site, owned by privately held Linden Lab of San Francisco, debuted Second Life in 2003 and makes money by charging a monthly fee to purchase virtual land and build a house or other structure on it. Land starts at $9.95 a month for a small lot, but for a band to set up a location to hold a concert with fancy details such as a stadium will cost at least $10,000, a Second Life executive said. Most of the cost goes to programmers who design the 3-D environment.

Second Life has more than 400,000 registered members. That's tiny compared with the millions on MySpace or other social networking Web sites, but Second Life is growing by about 10 percent a month. What's attractive, musicians say, is that the rich environment sucks people in -- sometimes for hours, compared with mere minutes spent at ordinary Web sites.

The virtual world has generated attention from retailers and marketing firms, which see it as a way to experiment with new products. Hip cotton clothier American Apparel set up a virtual store on Second Life in June, where people can spend real money to buy T-shirts for their avatars, and several other online designers sell fashionable jeans, tattoos and even hairstyles. Next month, Starwood Hotels plans to open a virtual loft-style hotel on Second Life where avatars can check in a year before the company builds the real thing in the real world -- or "RW," as people in the virtual world call it.

"There's elements of gimmick to it," said Lucian James, president of Agenda Inc., a brand marketing firm based in San Francisco. But "the whole interplay between online and offline is something people that Second Life is targeting don't have a problem with," he said. "With the online-offline divide, they see it much less as a gimmick than as a real thing."

The concept is attractive to a music industry looking to woo a new generation of fans who are used to interacting online. "There are no more music videos -- MTV doesn't show them, so we decided wouldn't it be cool if you could create an experience in a virtual world where you allow the user to be part of the music video with their friends?" said Reuben Steiger, president of marketing and consulting firm Millions of Us, which works with music labels to develop a virtual-world presence for artists.

His team built the Manhattan lofts for singer Regina Spektor and was surprised by the response. "There were parties around the clock in these lofts. It began to attract people who had never heard of Regina, and it wasn't overt marketing," Steiger said. "The more important thing was these were cool environments where people were meeting people they wouldn't have met before."

One drawback is that avatars can't keep up with humans' real-time pace of facial expressions and gestures. In Vega's performance, the virtual guitar would not appear on cue and, at first, appeared to stick out of her elbow. The number of attendees at some concerts is limited because crowds take up too much processing power. Sometimes, planners of virtual-reality events ask attendees not to bring too many accessories, such as big hairstyles, because they take up too much bandwidth.

"It's a way to experiment with image, mostly," Vega said. "It will be great when the avatars are more expressive, when they can 'speak,' have facial expressions. If you could shape-shift even during the performance -- I could become a buxom blonde for a minute and then return to my original form -- that would be fun."

Despite the tech glitches, many participants said there's an experiential quality that feels very real.

"There's a quality that doesn't exist in any other medium," said Bill Lichtenstein, president of the company that produces "The Infinite Mind," the radio show that put on the Vega performance, built a radio booth on Second Life, and plans to broadcast more interviews and performances. The virtual world, he said, simulates the real world in a way that tricks the brain into thinking it's real. "Sitting there in the audience, waiting for Vega to start, you got this feeling -- a sense of excitement."