Just had an interesting email from Melissa Linden which is being sent out to lots of musicians in Second Life. It seems Linden Lab are doing a survey gathering the views and hopes of musicians using their virtual world.  The survey contains some interesting questions, including comparisons to the benefits of Second Life over Myspace and vice versa, many suggestions for possible in world media and performance improvements and numerous boxes to suggest further ideas.

Could this signal a fresh initiative to develop Second Life as a platform for music, to compete more directly with established musicians networks like MySpace, TheSixtyOne, Garageband and many others. Could it also signal a more direct approach to creating a platform which would help foster a virtual music industry ? ( possibly taking cue’s from non creation based music worlds such as vSide ).

Here’s a few of things that came out in my answers ( I can’t remember it all now as you can’t go back to see the form once submitted ).

• Increased audience sizes – either through architectural changes to increase agent limits per sim or by some kind of sim mirroring
• More streaming integration – possible use of a modified higher quality stereo voice client to create more intimacy and less time distance between streamer and listener
• Integration / Investigation of MIDI in SL
• Improved integration with tools like Ninjam
• Improved calendar / events notification systems – direct integration with third party calendars ( google / eventful etc )
• Increased audio upload beyond 10s limit
• Monitoring / notification of successful sound preload on client
• Improved clientside simultaneous playback of sounds

If you are a musician, DJ or venue owner ( or in any other way involved in the music scene in Second Life ) and would like to take part in the survey it is here