November 16, 2006

Musicians Play Virtual Bars, Make Real Cash Without Leaving Home

By Stephen Totilo, with additional reporting by Matt Sunbulli (MTV.com)

SANTA BARBARA, California - Amy Te made $40 singing and playing guitar last month, and she did it without leaving her bedroom.

She sat in the small 12-square-foot room she shares with a classmate from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She took a seat in a cheap chair, put her guitar in her lap and made sure she had her microphone plugged into her four-year-old laptop.

Outside her second-story window is an ordinary suburban California cul-de-sac. During the next hour, a couple wheeled into their driveway and helped their baby out of his car seat. Some birds flew by. Te didn't pay attention. She was singing and playing her heart out. A virtual version of her appeared on her laptop the whole time in the online world "Second Life." The few dozen other avatars in the room danced and drew enough Internet bandwidth by their presence that it slowed the graphics on Te's computer to a slideshow. All of these avatars were controlled by other people, elsewhere in the world, each logging in to hear Te -- or Keiko Takamura, as she's known in "SL" play.

"In 'Second Life,' I am almost as big as you are going to get," she said. This is the new way to play music. Te didn't have to worry about having industry connections, sporting the right look or playing the kind of music that the people who live in her town want to hear. Instead, she rocks out virtually, and nothing (except maybe the computer she predicted last month had a "95 percent" chance of crashing midconcert) can stand in her way.

Many stories have been written about "Second Life," the malleable 3-D world that is not quite a game the way "World of Warcraft" is, but still has managed to draw a million users to run through its digital fields and play. And when they're not playing, people in the world are holding virtual benefit walkathons, shopping in a virtual version of American Apparel and rocking out with their own U2 cover band.

People started figuring out how to turn the world into a virtual concert stage last year. One of the most famous "Second Life" musicians, Eugene, Oregon's Jeremy Works, a.k.a. the in-game frog-legged Frogg Marlowe (FroggMarlowe.com), had been sleeping on friends' couches and struggling to find an audience for his hybrid of blues, folk and punk. Life had become difficult enough that he was writing songs about the most essential of problems, like needing a place to urinate. The lyrics go: "I need to pee/ Somebody better get me to a tree/ I need to pee, can't shake this feeling coming over me/ Oh may I pee in your toilet, sir, 'cause it's politer than your alley."

Things were not good. A friend in Eugene named Marc lePine, a.k.a. Jaycatt Nico in "Second Life," told Works about a new online world, and they figured out a way to play in it: Jaycatt on piano and Frogg on guitar and vocals. "Second Life" users could transmit virtual money to other players, so some started tipping Frogg Marlowe. He used the program's sanctioned service to turn it into cash. That helped him make ends meet, and now he's a fixture of the "Second Life" music scene.

Te started playing guitar at 14 while she lived in San Jose, California. It was a cool thing to do while she was in high school. "I'd sit on the grass during lunchtime and sing my songs, and my friends would gather around and clap," she said. It was also cathartic. "There's one tyrannical parent that I just had to write 10 songs about, so that was my outlet then." She wasn't crazy about home life and elected to go to UCSB because it was "the farthest away from San Jose that I could get."

But she didn't fit in at college either. She calls it a real-life "O.C." and fears playing her music in front of what she assumes would be a judgmental crowd of emo "music Nazis." So in college, she put music on ice. Then she put Santa Barbara on ice too. For her spring semester, earlier this year, she went to school in Tokyo. And that's where she got a fateful IM.

A friend from San Jose dropped her a line about "Second Life." "He's like, 'It's really cool. You should go out there and see the sex shops!' Because he was, like, into that. And so I downloaded it. And I was like, 'So, I'm a little character. And I'm walking around. And I'm supposed to talk to people and go to sex shops or something like that?' And I thought, 'This is really lame.' "

But a couple of weeks later she went flying through "Second Life" and heard something interesting. There was music playing, and two avatars were standing on the ground. They seemed to be talking about the music. What caught her ear was a voice telling someone to adjust his volume and play a little differently. She realized they were talking to each other and tweaking the music that was coming through her speakers. Wherever these guys were, she realized, they were playing live music into "Second Life." "I heard that, and I'm like, 'Wow! That's so awesome. I need to get on this.' "

The two players, Derek Tones and Erik Pasternak, told Te what she needed: namely, a microphone and some audio-streaming software, and walked her through an online performance. She played her first "SL" gig by March (for tips on how to play music in-world, the company behind "Second Life" has posted a primer at SecondLife.com/community/music.php).

By the time Te came back to California to start her senior year at USCB, she was selling out virtual coffeehouses. She plays as Keiko every other Tuesday at 6 p.m. PT at Old Salt's Pub in "Second Life" (her full performance schedule is at MySpace.com/KeikoTakamura). She sets up a virtual tip jar that other users can click on and send her money while she plays. She strums covers of Radiohead and rocks out her own songs, which she plugs as a CD available on her MySpace page. Her own music concerns personal issues, like "I Saw It Coming," a bitter ballad about boys who just want to sleep with you and split. She described her music as a combination of "Lisa Loeb slash Courtney Love slash Elliott Smith, umm, slash Alanis Morissette. Something like that."

A performance in "Second Life" is the happiest hour of her day, to the point where she won't let anything else interfere, not even classes. Consider that this semester, she's taking Anthropology, Art History and East Asian Cultural Studies. "I could have been taking a math class, which I should have done," she said. "But I think it started at, like, 6 p.m. And that's just like, prime time for me to be playing. So I was like, 'Yeah, I'll take it next term.' "

Te has music to play. And finally, she has a place to get it out.