Sony Music And Roblox Are Teaming Up To Bring More Events To The Metaverse

Roblox and Sony Music Entertainment have signed a strategic partnership that will see the two companies working together to deliver “innovative music experiences for the Roblox community” that will bring more Sony Music recording artists into the “Roblox metaverse.”

The partnership builds upon an already existing relationship between the two companies, which previously partnered together for events like a November 2020 Lil Nas X’s virtual concert in Roblox, an event more than 36 million people watched. Roblox is a online game platform where users can create and play games crafted by other users. The game’s popularity has boomed in the last year, in part due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Roblox’s daily active users hit 42 million in May 2021.

Jon Vlassopulos, vice president and global head of music at Roblox, says Sony Music has been a “fantastic partner” and that they understand the “massive opportunity that the metaverse presents” to artists.

“We are just scratching the surface of what Roblox can deliver to the music industry and to music fans around the world,” Vlassopulos says in a press release.

Dennis Kooker, Sony Music Entertainment president of global digital business and U.S. sales, says his company is looking to “further unlock commercial opportunities at the intersection of music and gaming.”

“Immersive online environments represent a meaningful opportunity for reaching a growing number of fans who want to use virtual communities to enjoy shared music experiences,” Kooker says.

Roblox, which went public in March, has also seen investment from other music companies like Warner Music Group, while drawing the ire of others, as seen in a recent $200 million copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the National Music Publishers’ Association. The lawsuit claims that the community-powered Roblox, which exists thanks to user-generated creations, is rife with copyright violations and that Roblox refuses to pay for songs that appear on the platform. Roblox says the lawsuit “represents a fundamental misunderstanding” of how the platform operates.

Virtual concerts and unique, limited-time in-game events have become popularized in recent years thanks to free-to-play games like Fortnite and Roblox. In 2020, when most concerts around the world were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual concerts became even more important for many, with both Fortnite and Roblox holding numerous concerts in-game. Fortnite has also debuted trailers for films like Tenet and The Rise of Skywalker.