Marshmello in Pleasant Park
Marshmello performed a concert in Fortnite, ten minutes in Pleasant Park with cartoon characters bouncing around him. It was what you’d expect—bright, chaotic, a thing to witness once and forget.
This happened before. Second Life had digital concerts too, years ago, with the same sense that entertainment was about to completely dematerialize. Celebrities showing up in the metaverse, brands opening storefronts, everyone convinced this was how people would experience culture from now on. But it didn’t stick because you can already hear any song you want whenever you want. The experience isn’t the music. It’s being somewhere at the same time as everyone else, and a game doesn’t really deliver that.
Marshmello’s a natural fit anyway. He’s one of those SoundCloud producers who somehow built a career bigger than anyone expected—”WaVeZ” dropped in 2015, and people latched on. The oversized white helmet, the anonymity, the brand of staying opaque while remaining omnipresent. He’s everywhere: collabs, social media, YouTube cooking tutorials where he’s still in costume. For people who grew up with Twitch and Discord, he feels native to a game in a way most musicians don’t.
The concert itself was forgettable mechanics—dancing emotes, a big stage, music playing. But the question that surfaced with Second Life and never really went away keeps coming back: are we looking at the future of entertainment, or just a platform trying to monetize its audience through novelty?
I think the appeal is simpler than people admit. No one’s there for the music—the music exists everywhere. They’re there to be part of something, to say they were there when it happened. A game makes that easy. There’s no real experience, no difference from watching a video, but it feels exclusive, it feels like a moment. That feeling is enough.
And it works, so it’ll keep happening. As long as there’s a platform with millions of players, someone will figure out how to turn it into an event. Marshmello will do another one, and someone else will follow, and in a few years this won’t feel novel anymore. It’ll just be another distribution channel, the same as a YouTube stream, a Spotify drop, a TikTok trend. The medium changes, the hunger to be part of the moment stays the same.