Eminem and Snoop Dogg go Metaverse Live

Eminem and Snoop Dogg performed their new single (which features two Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars, each owned by Slim Shady and the Doggfather) in a Yuga Labs Metaverse during this year’s MTV’s Video Music Awards. What a lot of excitement this has caused! The duo performed their new song “From the D to the LBC” in a metaverse game environment made by Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The performance was aired at the MTV Video Music Awards. It was the first live broadcast of NFT-related metaverse footage and performance.

The event’s commentaries have gone wild. The most exciting part of the event is the attempt to blend live and Metaverse experiences. Anyone who has seen the without graphics footage would see the “reality” of physical performance capture (off stage) with avatars appearing in the Metaverse footage being shown onscreen in the auditorium. Many commentators though are talking about this as the next stage in live performance – as one commentator I saw suggested, why watch The Rolling Stones as they are now if you can see them performing in the Metaverse “looking good, looking fresh”. Although it may seem a little too early for this, it is certainly an area that many rights owners, creators and brands are watching closely.

However, there are still many questions. Is it a way to allow indie creators or is this a corporate colonization of Metaverse? Or is the Metaverse becoming something like a gigantic billboard?

Of course, graphics quality has been subject to a lot scrutiny. Yuga Labs’ metaverse, the Otherside, is still a work in process, “phase one” of a development process that will eventually allow Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT holders to play as their ape avatars in an interoperable metaverse environment. Yuga Labs describes the Otherside as a “gamified, interoperable metaverse [that] blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and web3-enabled virtual worlds.” In the performance, Eminem and Snoop Dogg start off in the flesh, sitting on a sofa, with Snoop holding what appears to be a large joint. They are then taken into an animated setting which can be viewed in the venue. The graphics quality has been heavily criticised online by fans for being outdated and lacking in quality.

This project is interesting because of the way NFT owners are able to grant licences to use images or images they own rights to in new ways. Snoop Dogg & Eminem have sold memorabilia using the name Ape Editions. In other words, they discovered a new way of utilizing the IP rights associated to owning their avatars. More of this is sure to come.

Eminem and Snoop Dogg shared a version of their recent collaboration ‘From The D 2 The LBC’ that saw them mix in-person performance with digital technology. The appearance was organised in partnership with Yuga Labs – an NFT and cryptocurrency company best known for the Bored Apes project – and was inspired by “the world of the Otherside metaverse”.