Subscribe to WIRED Magazine

Virtual Worlds, Real Money: Can Social Games Solve Music’s Woes?

My virtual panda went to the mayor's house to play him a song. You can listen to music together with real friends in the game.


Music fans of tomorrow are kids of today, and the way they pay for digital content is through virtual worlds like Farmville and Penguin Town, which turn the acquisition of virtual goods — and digital music is nothing if not a virtual good — into a game.

Conduit Labs’ Music Pets app for Facebook may look cute, but it could have tangible ramifications for how music is discovered and sold in the future.

The goal of Music Pets is to entertain a virtual pet by training it to like the music you like, then using points to send the pet out to find more music to add to your collection. It sounds silly, but this cartoon-ish virtual world includes every element of the real-world music experience: getting recommendations, deciding whether you like songs, collecting music, and going over to your friends’ “houses” to play songs from your collection, which, as with just about everything else, requires that you expend points.

As with similar games, you can get everything you want for your pet and your music collection for free, so long as you have the time to add them to your pet’s training regimen by engaging in repetitive, somewhat amusing activities, including a Plinko-style game that has you trying to bounce balls onto all of the letters in a band’s name. Powering up for more points without spending lots of time requires that you pay up in real money, which is something many people simply don’t do for digital music in other contexts.

Conduit Labs passes on a percentage of revenue to labels, which then pass some of that along to artists and publishers. Is it possible that little furry cartoon characters from Tamagotchi-land will succeed where industry heavyweights have failed: in convincing kids to pay for music?

So far, the Music Pet Facebook app has drawn over a million users since its launch about a month ago, and the company recently inked a deal with the biggest record label in the world, Universal Music Group, to complement its healthy selection of independent labels (Beggars Group, Domino, Downtown and Modular) in Music Pet as well as its other games, Loudcrowd, which launched at SXSW last year and Super Dance. Rather than selling music at a specific price, the company keeps price vague, because users earn music through a combination of effort and time.

“The public perception of the value of a song is very skewed and has little to do with its actual price,” Conduit Labs founder Nabeel Hyatt told “We believe offering fun, social, interactive experiences with music is the best way to monetize.”

If the idea of grown men and women discovering and collecting music using a cute little avatar sounds absurd, you probably haven’t watched Jesse Schell’s DICE talk. If you don’t have the 20 minutes it takes to watch the whole thing, it can pretty much be summed up in one sentence: In the future, he claims, everything will be a game. It’s either a horrifying Orwellian vision of what’s to come or an indication that we’ll all be more amused in the coming years, depending on how you look at it.

In the real world, people typically discover music through other people, give it a listen, decide whether to acquire it, and then take it out for a spin every once in a while and maybe play the song for friends.

Music Pets replicates all of that, except that it makes every stage into a game. If Schell is right, this is a template for how the kids of today will purchase music tomorrow.

Here’s how it works:

See Also: