I talked to Darryl Swann a few weeks back. He’s a producer and educator in LA, and he’s been building a VR concert platform called Moshpit. He started out in Los Angeles, has spent decades in the industry, and has the kind of perspective that comes from watching the same business get rebuilt multiple times.
His central argument is that the next shift in music isn’t about production — it’s about presence. How you’re inside the experience, not just listening to it.
Moshpit
Moshpit started as a VR platform for concerts. Give people who can’t be there a way to be there. Straightforward enough. It’s since grown into something messier: a tool for virtual music environments that don’t really have a physical analogue. Not a workaround for not having a show. More like a different kind of show.
Swann pushes back on the idea that virtual concerts are a pandemic-era fallback that never quite went away. His argument is that they do things a physical venue can’t — artists reaching audiences in markets they’d never tour, interactive layers that would fall apart on a real stage, smaller acts with no budget suddenly accessible globally. Whether that’s the future or an edge case is the open question.
It all depends on headsets. He predicts VR and AR eyewear become as common as smartphones within a decade. That’s bold. It’s also been bold for longer than people usually admit.
AR at live shows
He’s also watching augmented reality — digital elements overlaid on real stages, avatars alongside physical performers, visuals that shift based on where you’re standing. The pieces exist in fragments. Nobody’s put them together without it feeling like a proof-of-concept rather than an experience.
Swann thinks that changes. I think he’s probably right about the setting if not the timeline. Concert audiences are already agreeing to be absorbed by something. AR has a lower threshold to clear there than almost anywhere else.
3D interfaces for music discovery
He sees 3D interactive websites — virtual spaces for browsing catalogs, watching content, interacting with artists — as the next phase after streaming. Honestly, this is the one I struggle to picture. Streaming interfaces are already too much. But the argument isn’t about complexity, it’s about structure: flat screens have limits, and if headsets become normal, the interface question reopens entirely.
Blockchain, still
Swann is a genuine believer in blockchain for rights management. The pitch is familiar: decentralized ledgers let artists control royalties directly, remove intermediaries, tokenize assets, issue collectibles. The music industry has been hearing this for years. Swann thinks it eventually lands. He might be right. The gap between the promise and what’s actually deployed has just been wide for a long time.
Quantum computing is different — he’s watching rather than predicting. Faster audio processing, new composition approaches. Still theoretical. Worth tracking.
One thing to keep in mind
Swann is building Moshpit. He has a direct stake in virtual concerts working out. That doesn’t make his arguments wrong, but it shapes which ones he leads with.
The music industry’s track record is reacting to technology rather than steering it. Swann is trying to be early. I’m not sure all of his bets pay off on his timeline. But being early to the wrong idea isn’t actually that different from being early to the right one — and he’s been in the room long enough to know the difference.
Leave a Reply