After having just written an editorial criticizing the perceived lack of live music events in Sansar, guess what? I signed onto Twitter, to find the following tweet:
Join the Lost World Global Music Festivals on the 3rd-4th July the two 12 hour streams will be live broadcast on Twitch and into a Virtual World in Sansar especially built for this event.
Is this event an encouraging sign? Yes. Is it enough on its own? No. Let’s hope that Sansar actually does some effective promotion for this, instead of just leaving the job up to the organizers and word-of-mouth. I did a quick Google search and found the following plea for volunteers from one of the organizers, posted to the r/virtualreality subReddit:
We are working on our next music festival inside Sansar. Which can be attended in VR also Non VR. The last one was such a success we have been asked to do more, but we’re still looking for some help. We know a lot of people are sitting at home that might want to volunteer a little bit of their time. If you are a Club promoter, Event organizer or have experience in PR get in touch.
Again, I will say this: if Wookey-run Sansar is just going to sit idly by and expect unpaid volunteers to do all the heavy lifting for events (including promotion), then I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough. In its short history, Sansar has already burned through its first set of volunteers, people who have simply given up and moved on to other platforms (and I am one of them).
If Sansar expects to survive and thrive, then they are going to have to do the extra work to get at least a dozen Global Music Festivals onto their social VR platform! As we saw from the history of the old High Fidelity, simply having big events every couple of months doesn’t work, either; you need a steady stream of live events to keep people coming back, making connections, and setting down roots in any virtual world.
Wookey-run Sansar needs to learn from the example set by competing platforms such as AltspaceVR, which has just been running circles around Sansar lately in their work to attract, cultivate and promote live events. Just compare the event calendars of AltspaceVR and Sansar and you can see for yourself what effective event promotion can do. It’s a virtuous circle: more promotion means more people, who in turn create more events when they see what a platform like AltspaceVR can provide.
MARKETING IS A COST OF DOING BUSINESS, SANSAR. DO SOME. Simply calling yourself a live events platform isn’t enough; you have to back up those words with some action, and put your money where you mouth is. Anything else is lazy, short-sighted, and stupid.
As RuPaul says, “You better work!”
