By changing the VMAs stage into Otherside's aesthetic for their most recent joint track, "From the D 2 the LBC," the worldwide rap legends, together with Otherside founder Yuga Labs, will give Otherside some significant mainstream exposure.
The VMAs have included a "Best Metaverse Performance" category in their annual awards, which appears to be a sign to the music world that Metaverse performances should receive greater attention. Justin Bieber, Twenty-One Pilots, and the Rift Tour with Ariana Grande are among the nominees for the honor.
The VMAs may have thought that by embracing the Metaverse, they would be able to boost their falling audience counts. The awards have suffered a continuous loss in viewers after reaching a peak of 12.4 million in 2011, and the 900,000 people that turned in live to watch the awards on MTV was the 8th year in a row that viewership has dipped.
Their collaboration on the song, nominated for the "Best Hip Hop" award, is their first in twenty years. Eminem and Snoop Dogg are both collectors of BAYC NFTs, and the song's music video makes extensive use of materials from the NFT collection. Snoop Dogg recently appeared in an animated Bored Apes video and other NFTs, and Esther Anaya's EDM tune BAYC.
An interactive, gamified metaverse called The Otherside is now under beta testing. The platform provides Otherdeed NFTs, whose owners are known as "Voyagers," to signify digital ownership of land plots in the virtual world associated with BAYC.
Litepaper claims:
"Otherside will support interoperability in the future, giving Voyagers a chance to bring their outside collections and NFTs to life within our metaverse."
On July 16, 4500 users could enter The Otherside's Metaverse for the first time and explore the virtual setting. The voyage, limited to "Voyagers" and a few chosen third-party developers, seemed to have been a massive success based on tweets from its followers.