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DMC Looks To Virtual World To Connect With, Inform Audience

We previously reported that rapper Darryl "DMC" McDaniels would be launching his own virtual world with Worlds.com at the end of the month. DMC and Worlds CEO Thom Kidrin were showing off the new environment at Engage! Expo yesterday, and the excitement from DMC about the potential for the virtual world was palpable. His interests in the future of the world, ranging from education to art to collaborative jamming, are vast, but right now he's simply looking forward to a new way to talk to people.

"I just like it because it’s a way for me to communicate directly with people, directly with the audience," he explained. "You’re looking at back in the day and you just had the fan club. They’d write me a letter, I’d get it, and it’d take me a month to write back. And then [later] it was like, 'Alright, I’ve got to go into the Yahoo office, sit down with someone who knows how to work the computer, and DMC will be on Yahoo at 3:30 on Friday and you can suggest questions.' Now I can be like, 'Yo, meet me in my world and let’s hang out.'"

The world, which currently features a few rooms like an avatar gallery, club, and rooftop garden, could eventually be much larger. DMC, at least, is interested in growing it far beyond simply a social environment. While that's all in the future, Kidrin says that, as long as the ideas are technically feasible, Worlds is happy to support wherever DMC wants to go.

"I’m going to have poetry slams and asking them to send in their best 16-bar verse or put a beat up and see who can make the best songs," said DMC. "I want to put a school room up for kids who are studying Black History. I want subjects like natural history and economics. I wasn’t even thinking about all this until they showed it to me. But it’s not about me at all. I’m just the bait."

And DMC, even without an active Run-DMC may still be strong bait. The band is being admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in early April, and DMC will be releasing his second solo album (the first in three years) not long after. When he does, the album will be available through the virtual world alongisde a variety of virtual goods and real merchandise provided through Worlds' partnership with Paid.

"I’ve always believed that virtual communities based around music and fans that support musical talent is a way to scale very quickly," said Kidrin. "D has a very large audience that he speaks to through his various other communities, so he’ll be able to reach out. There are other big audiences that we’re talking to now that have much larger audiences, but part of what we had to do was prove the model and prove the technology."

Worlds, which existed in a previous incarnation in the '90s with artists like Aerosmith, has been working in the past year and a half to update its rendering engine and technology platform. DMC's World represents the first launch on the new engine, and Kidrin hopes it's baseline and a sign of things to come. He added that the company is currently in talks with other artists who, collectively, could bring in a fan base of 3-5 million users from existing clubs.

Right now, users will sign in through DMC's World and be recognized as a DMC user. That would be true for any other artist, offering them each their own unique space. The Worlds player, once installed, though, is compatible with any other potential worlds, allowing them to be more connected.

"We believe at least in entertainment that people will go to a DMC world, an Aerosmith world, a Kanye West world, and that’s the fan that may just go to that singular experience, but they’re also under the larger genre of hip hop, rock, or just music," said Kidrin. "In that sense, Worlds will create more generic thematics so they can walk out of the world into a street, to use the metaphor, and go into a club. That’s the connective tissue."

DMC's World could potentially become a revenue source for Worlds.com and the artist as they share revenue for merchandise sold through the world and from premium subscriptions, but profits will also go to DMC's sponsored charity, The Felix Organization, which aims to provide a summer camp for adopted children.

DMC, though, says he's unconcerned about making money from the virtual world. The goal for him with the project, as from his rapping career, is to connect to fans and then educate and inspire them. So while he may pursue a Radiohead-style distribution model, putting up his album for sale in the world with exclusive tracks on a pick-your-own-price basis, he'll also be pitching the world to kids when he speaks at middle and high schools.

"Kids get the information at eight they’re supposed to get at 18 and get the information at 18 that they should at 24. That’s why the world is so twisted, but I can regulate this world the way it should be," he said. "It’s not about control. It’s about introducing information in a way that can be productive to the participant. And, at the end of the day, it just makes them feel cool."

The benefit, he says, is that the virtual world is more communal and controlled than something like MySpace. In our conversation, DMC referenced news coming out of Stanford and other institutions about virtual worlds used for promoting weightloss, mobility in paralyzed crash victims, and mental health. While his aims aren't so scientific, he understands the benefit of interaction.

"They’re gonna do it," he said of other musicians and virtual worlds. "This is cooler than MySpace. With MySpace, you see a picture of the person, I answer them, and they see my picture. Now we can be moving around and doing other stuff. I’m not a big gamer, but it’s the same technology. My son plays games all day, and you can dress your football player in whatever team colors. Here I can dress me, you can dress you, and you can come to the virtual world and not even worry about me. You worry about how you want to look and what you want to do. You can represent yourself without actually representing yourself."