Pleasant Park, 2019

Second Life had banks. Actual banks, opening digital branches, hiring staff to answer questions from avatars about mortgage rates. At the time it felt like either a portent or a joke—you couldn’t tell which. Bands played concerts there. Celebrities showed up for meet-and-greets. The virtual economy ran hot enough that some people made real money in it. Then it didn’t. Then everyone filed it away as one of those early-internet things that felt important and turned out to be a detour.

Marshmello just played a ten-minute concert in Fortnite’s Pleasant Park and I’m thinking about Second Life again. The show drew millions of players who put down their weapons for the duration and danced, jumped, and spun their avatars around while his music played. Marshmello—the DJ who started with SoundCloud uploads, built his identity around an anonymous marshmallow helmet, and turned that into one of the more improbably sustained careers in EDM—is perfectly calibrated for this. His audience is young enough to live inside Fortnite already. The concert wasn’t a stunt to them. It was just a thing that happened on a Saturday.

The question everyone asks—is this the future?—feels both obvious and beside the point. Virtual concerts won’t replace physical ones for the same reason MP3s didn’t replace records: people want the thing itself, and they also want the thing they can have at home. Both can coexist. What’s genuinely interesting is that a generation is now growing up with the virtual version as the first version, not the substitute. When they’re thirty they’ll have concert memories that took place inside a game. That’s a different relationship to live music than any previous generation has had, and I honestly don’t know what it produces downstream. Something, though.