Shiger Seattle

By Dave Rose
Now here’s something different: Shiger Seattle is a singer/songwriter who does not perform live in the traditional sense of smoky bars, sweating fans, and alcohol drenched floors. He does perform live for fans from all around the
world, but instead in a virtual community called Second Life, online at secondlife.com.
He has been performing live virtual concerts in Second Life for two years and was selected to perform at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago in August 2007.
Shiger also released his debut CD this past August. The CD, a collection of acoustic-based songs, blends rock, alternative
and blues-influenced music.
The CD was recorded with Dick Hodgin and Ian Schreier at Osceola Studios in Raleigh. - Raleigh Downtowner

By Joanna Willard
Shiger Seattle Releases New CD in Second Life
(Raleigh, NC) – Attending your favorite rock concert may be as easy as a click of the mouse. A growing music scene has landed in the virtual world. Music fans are tuning into virtual communities such as Second Life to hear new musicians from around the world perform live concerts.

Shiger Seattle is a popular singer/songwriter in Second Life. He hails from Raleigh, NC, and has been performing live virtual concerts in Second Life for two years. Shiger (she-ger) has built a global following in the virtual community and has been selected to perform at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago in August 2007.

"I have a growing family, and it just didn't make sense to perform at all hours of the night in bars and clubs," said Shiger Seattle. "Performing in Second Life is amazing. My audience has grown worldwide. While about 75-percent of my fans are in the U.S., my server statistics show listeners from around the globe including China, UK, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, Australia, Brazil and more."

Virtual club owners pay musicians to perform in Second Life and musicians also get tips from music fans in the online community. There is a wide variety of music available to music fans at any time of the day or night.

Shiger Seattle’s success in Second Life has enabled him to release his self-titled debut CD on August 16, 2007. The collection of new rock acoustic-based songs blends rock, alternative and blues influenced music.

The independent disc was recorded at Osceola Studios in Raleigh, NC. The recording studio is well known as a Southeastern powerhouse and has recorded the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Velvet Revolver among many others. The CD was recorded by producer Dick Hodgin (Hootie and the Blowfish, Cravin' Melon, Flat Duo Jets) and mixed by Grammy-nominated Ian Schreier.

The new CD features Shiger Seattle on vocals and acoustic guitar, Barry Briggs on electric guitar, Leo Kishore on bass and recent 96 Rock (WBBB-FM) drum-off champion Matt Spinak.

The first single off of the new CD is titled Someone Else and captures Shiger Seattle's experience in Second Life.

I want to know what it's like to be someone else
I want to step inside another's head
Meet me at your safest secret corner
I want to see the world through those eyes

I want to know what it's like
I want a second life
I want another try
I want to know what it's like to be someone else

The Shiger Seattle CD is available on the web at www.shigerseattle.com.

- Raleighmusic.com

Attending your favorite rock concert may be as easy as a click of the mouse. A growing music scene has landed in the virtual world. Music fans are tuning into virtual communities such as Second Life (www.secondlife.com) to hear new musicians from around the world perform live concerts.
Shiger Seattle is a popular singer/songwriter in Second Life. He hails from Raleigh, NC and has been performing live virtual concerts in Second Life for two years. Shiger (she-ger) has built a global following in the virtual community and has been selected to perform at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago in August 2007.

"I have a growing family, and it just didn't make sense to perform at all hours of the night in bars and clubs," said Shiger Seattle. "Performing in Second Life is amazing. My audience has grown worldwide. While about 75-percent of my fans are in the U.S, my server statistics show listeners from around the globe including China, UK, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, Australia, Brazil and more."

Virtual club owners pay musicians to perform in Second Life and musicians also get tips from music fans in the online community. There is a wide variety of music available to music fans at anytime of the day or night.

- Antimusic.com

By Caroline McCarthy
When nearly 800 Second Life users hit Chicago this weekend for the third annual Second Life Community Convention, most will acknowledge it hasn't been a smooth ride lately for the virtual world.
At last year's SLCC in San Francisco, Second Life was still viewed by mass media as a quirky hub for bizarre subcultures and utopian dreamers.


But circumstances have changed. The Second Life that will be the centerpiece of 2007's SLCC, an event almost twice as large as its predecessor in terms of attendance, is facing a different public perception as the most written about and sometimes the most reviled virtual environment (even though it's by no means the most popular).

So what happened?

Second Life became a media and corporate darling. Companies from NBC Universal to Coca-Cola commissioned in-game presences. (CNET Networks has its own virtual building.) Events as mainstream as a Jay-Z performance on Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show were simulcast in virtual arenas, and the colorful 3D landscape was talked up as the future face of commerce, advertising, job recruiting and even dating.

Within months, there was a backlash. The virtual world's oft-clunky interface became the subject of parody, and the pratfalls of the infrastructure created by parent company Linden Lab became apparent with well-documented lag times and crashes.

The fact that Linden's servers limit virtual event attendance to a few dozen avatars also didn't bode well for companies that wanted a Second Life headquarters to reflect their brand popularity. Skeptical bloggers began posting hand-compiled statistics about how Second Life's's seemingly fast-growing population was largely inactive, and Wired magazine's August issue featured a story by Frank Rose called "How Madison Avenue is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life."

According to active Second Life users, it was too much, too early. "It's an experiential, experimental type of place," said Linda Zimmer, who runs the Business Communicators of Second Life blog. "It's not a mass medium, and it won't be for years down the road...I think that some companies jumped in with unreal expectations."

Tracy Ryan, an associate professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in the new-media ad landscape, agreed Second Life should be considered an experimental sandbox. "You have to jump in and do it to figure it out, because people haven't been marketing in virtual worlds for very long," Ryan said. "We don't know exactly how it's going to work, or what branding's going to be like, or how residents of Second Life or any other metaverse are going to respond to branded communications in that kind of environment."

"The first mistake is companies assuming, 'OK, well, I have a store on Fifth Avenue that's very successful, so I could put a store in a heavily trafficked area of Second Life and it'll be successful.'"
--Tracy Ryan, associate professor, Virginia Commonwealth University Companies are learning, she added. Some have backed out, discovering that their brands haven't adapted to Second Life quite as well as they'd have thought. "The first mistake is companies assuming, 'OK, well, I have a store on Fifth Avenue that's very successful, so I could put a store in a heavily trafficked area of Second Life and it'll be successful.' Second Life doesn't work that way."

At SLCC '07, there are no panels about how to brighten Second Life's image in the media or attract mass-market crowds. There are, however, panels about virtual sex and relationships, how your avatar can run its own video blog, the issue of intellectual property rights, and entrepreneurship. There's also a party on Saturday night that's a clear throwback to Second Life's roots as a hub for quirky subculture--a "lace and leather" themed masquerade ball (perhaps not an ideal branding opportunity for Coca-Cola).

There's also live music by artists who have become well-known in Second Life through simulcasted shows. One of them is Chris Shigas (SHIGER SEATTLE), a vice president at emerging media firm French-West-Vaughan, who will be playing on Saturday evening. "I've been doing virtual concerts for about two years," Shigas said. "I think it's wonderful...The ability to perform for an audience from my home was valuable, and it was really attractive to me."

At this weekend's conference, the panels on Saturday and Sunday are divided into four groups--business, education, social and "machinima" (a conglomeration of "machine" and "cinema"). Participants are encouraged to choose one topic and follow it for the weekend, thus narrowing the focus and providing more direction and productivity.

Organization, users say, is going to be key to solving Second Life's identity issues. "Crowdsourcing," or inviting the public to do a task typically performed by an employee, and user-generated content are hot marketing concepts. But when it comes to a massive and versatile platform like Second Life, the laissez-faire Linden Lab essentially gave free license to the marketers and corporations diving in, as well as the journalists meticulously documenting its emergence into the mainstream, to shape and brand the virtual world's image.

There's a big downside to that: an outsized reaction when a morning news show talks about Second Life's potential as a terrorist training tool, or when a blogger comments on how nothing seems to draw the crowds in-world like a sadomasochism den--not to mention all the high-profile stories about disappointing advertising ventures.

But recent history could be in Second Life's favor. "A lot of the negativity that I've heard about Second Life echoes nearly exactly some of the complaints about the World Wide Web in the early '90s," Shigas said.

"Where people say there's nothing to do, or it's too complicated for people to understand, or there's too much sex, or I'll never trust my banking information--all these arguments were really prevalent in the early '90s about whether people would embrace the Web and whether it could be a place for commerce or business," he added.

In fairness, signs of user-friendliness are already starting to appear in Second Life.There's already Slurl, a Linden-grown project that assigns HTML addresses to specific in-world locations so that your avatar can "teleport" to a new spot on the grid through your Web browser.

In other words, Second Life gurus willingly admit that the overdose of media attention and subsequent scrutiny gave the virtual world quite the hangover, but it still knows how to party.

Even if corporate America doesn't want to attend.
- CNET News