In October at Music x Media event in Tampere, Finland, Music Finland announced a cooperaton with Decentraland, the world's largest user-owned and managed virtual world. The results will be seen now, when the Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival starts in Decentraland in 10 November – with two Finnish artists, Maija Kauhanen and Handshaking performing.

More than 150 acts will perform on 15 different stages in the festival area built in the virtual world, for four days and around the clock. The main attractions of the festival are e.g. Björk and Ozzy Osbourne, along with two Finnish acts, Maija Kauhanen and Handshaking, without a doubt.

With this cooperation, Music Finland is probably the first music export organization in the world to have entered into a partnership agreement with a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), i.e. a decentralized autonomous organization operating on a blockchain. So Decentraland is not a company, but is owned by the users of the platform: they can have, for example, virtual land or MANA tokens managed by Decentraland. While Finnish companies and organizations such as Sitra and Kansallisgalleria and Marimekko have reported on their experiments on the platform have also been on display at Decentraland during the fall, It's now Music Finland's turn to bring Finnish music to the metaverse!

Test laboratory for a new kind of music business

The cooperation with Decentraland is part of the wider music industry growth strategy project, which Music Finland launched at the beginning of this year. The goal of the EU-funded project is to build new openings for the entire industry, to conduct experiments in the area of utilizing new technologies and to improve the internationalization possibilities of the Finnish music industry.

Welcome to the Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival for a peek into the possible future of the music industry from November 10th to 13th. Jump directly to the festival area here: Genesis Plaza, Decentraland – the application works with the Google Chrome browser. You can find information about the event here and on Decentraland's website.

Handshaking will perform at the event on Thursday 10.11. at 9 Finnish time and Maija Kauhanen on Friday 11.11. at 9 Finnish time. The event is free of charge and does not require separate registration.

Motel Finlandia paved the virtual road for Finnish music

Music Finland's own virtual promotion platform Motel Finlandia (pictured in the image above), will also be updated with new content on November 10. – the artists will be Handshaking, Robin Packalen and Hevisaurus. The Motel Finlandia platform, which was launched in March 2022 at the SXSW event in the USA, has been tested in promotional use abroad in connection with export promotion events during 2022.

Music Finland implemented Motel Finlandia, our first step into virtual worlds, in order to evaluate how we could make the best possible use of new platforms in our operations. The development partner of the Motel Finlandia platform is Arilyn from Finland, which was also the technical implementation partner in the content produced for the Decentraland event.

Watch a trailer film for Motel Finlandia:

This project is financed by the European Union's Next Generation EU funding, which is channeled through the RRF (Recovery and Resilience Facility) support by the Ministry of Education and Culture.