International audienceThe real-world music industry is undergoing a transition away from the retailing and distribution of fixed objects (records, files) to the consumption of live,interactive events (concerts, happenings). This development is paralleled with the recent flourishing of live music in virtual worlds, which in many ways could become the epitome of its real-world counterpart: for the artists, virtual concerts are cheap and easy to organize, and can therefore be a viable alternative to performing in the real world; for the music promoter and marketer, virtual concert attendance can be traced and analyzed more easily than in the real world; for the virtual concertgoer, attending concerts that are happening a (virtual) world away is possible with a single click. Taking insights from both a survey among the Second-Life music practitioners and from our own prototype of a live music recommendation system built on top of Second-Life, this article shows that the technical infrastructure of current virtual worlds is not well-suited to the development of the content management tools needed to support this opportunity. We propose several new ways to address these problems, and advocate for their recognition both by the artistic and the technical community
