To date in my travels in Second Life, I’ve learnt how to adapt my appearance, talk to other avatars and, er, fly. At the end of the last part, I’d opted to leave the Help Island and arrived in Second Life proper. I found myself on a narrow walkway with other noobs flicking into existence all around me. After a little look round the adjacent airport and some rather fantastical constructions, it was time to find a music store.

There appear to be four straightforward ways to move around in Second Life - walking, running, flying and teleporting. To do the latter, you need to know where you want to go. Selecting the Edit menu located at the top of the screen and choosing Search opens up a screen with a number of tabs and options. The fifth tab, Places supplies a pull-down menu with access to a range of activities including discussion, sports, games, education, arts and culture, pageants! and the all-important ’shopping’.

With that option chosen and ‘music’ entered into the search box, a long list of options appeared - The Little Music Store looked promising, I pressed Teleport and found myself standing outside my destination. Taking a look round, this store seemed to sell a fine range of music hardware - everything from sci-fi music boxes to boomboxes, reel-to-reel recorders to oversize loudspeakers. Each was a front end to some streamed music - the range included Smooth Jazz, DJ Trance Channel, Sky FM and so on.

Each of these could be purchased with Linden Dollars and taken back to your Second Life home. As I haven’t mastered how to purchase anything yet or built my own home, I passed on that. I did however click on a card that offered dance scripts and came royally unstuck - I found myself maniacally dancing unable to stop! Of course, another Second Lifer appeared at that moment and proceeded to watch me make a complete idiot of myself. After doing everything I could think of to try to stand still, I eventually gave up and quit the programme. To my great relief, on returning I found I was no longer gyrating like a crazy thing. The moral is - don’t do anything you can’t undo! (which translates in Second Life into don’t let anything run scripts on your avatar).

Back to Search and next I choose ‘MP3 Music Store - Direct Downloads’:

This place contained six booths and a wall of artist images at the back. Clicking on the mock CD player in each booth brought up a list of tracks to play. The music was serviceable. Walking out of a cubicle caused the music to stop, which was nice. I could then have selected an artist from the wall at the back and taken it home - an information card helpfully informed me that “All music is free from our website since we do music promotions for independent artists and djs worldwide, we have a small fee for bandwith and convienience here in secondlife.”

Finally for this post, I chose another option at random and was taken to an island complete with shops and a small number of avatars walking up and down the street:

One of these shops (complete with scantily-clad busker performing outside) offered the chance to listen to a small number of musicians by clicking on images as shown below. As before the music was nothing to write home about.

From these initial impressions, Second Life appears to have a long way to go before it presents anything like a 3-dimensional iTunes Music Store. The music I encountered, in this admittedly limited sampling, wasn’t exactly striking. There wasn’t any clear way of discerning quality without going to literally visiting/teleporting to specific places. Stores would benefit from a user-generated rating system. The number of options available in the Search menu is very limited. Still, there is a sense of (unrealised) potential about music in Second Life, a sense that at some point in the future, it might be possible to and use it as a place to sample and purchase music.

As a significant threat to Second Life’s reign as premiere virtual alternative, this week saw the announcement of Sony’s own virtual enterprise, the Playstation-linked Home. It will be interesting to see how Sony leverage their global media assets in their new world. It’s a safe bet their plans include music sales.

Previously: Part 1: Arrival, Part 2: my first disco

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