Lady Wallace Sings - and kills the traditional music industry

Full discloure, folks: my opinion on her may be biased. I don’t find myself too often writing about a good friend and also someone I am collaborating with on a few music projects in these terms. But it happens there are some good reasons for my online friend and IMVU avatar Lady Wallace to be in the news.

Lady Wallace (real name Mary Elizabeth Wallace) joined IMVU.com less than two years ago. She wanted to see if that could be of some use to promote her music, just like her MySpace page. A road many other people have taken (me included ;)) since the Internet gave people a chance to express themselves in music and many other fields.

Her first effort happened to be a music track accompained by a 3d video filmed within the virtual world of IMVU (www.imvu.com), which may be defined as a cross between Second Life or something similar to that, and an instant messaging system. You basically chat in public or private rooms with online friends and everyone is represented by a 3d avatar. MSN Messenger made into a videogame, if you prefer.

Just as in second Life, independent “developers” create objects for your avatars and your IMVU page: and copyright for these objects stays with their creators, not IMVU Inc. The company lives mostly selling “credits” (just like Linden Lab and Second Life have their own virtual currency) and thosse can be used to purchase stuff.

Music soon became an important part of the IMVU scene: but 90% of that wouldn’t have been approved by the music industry. They were just bits or entire tracks ripped out of cds amd converted to a format suitable for IMVU: avatars would “wear” visible (or invisible) objects containing the tracks and play those for their friends, maybe enjoying dancing in a club that exists only in cyberspace.

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