MTV Dives Into Metaverse and Features Snoop Dogg and Eminem as Bored Apes

Two of America’s finest rappers, Snoop Dogg and Eminem got the opportunity to perform at the just concluded MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs). The Sunday show was the debut attempt of the entertainment channel to venture into the Metaverse. The performance was flashed on the Yuga Labs metaverse site, Otherside.

The background setting for the video was the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) virtual land. Eminem and Snoop Dogg’s performance in the metaverse started after Eminem got high from smoking a large leftover spliff from Snoop Dogg. These were all illustrated with comics. They didn’t turn into their Bored Ape until they were high enough.

The non-fungible token (NFT) friendly rap icons were already scheduled to perform to provide mainstream exposure for Otherside.

Meanwhile, the Otherside is a product of the partnership between Yuga Labs’ BAYC and Animoca Brands, an NFT investment and gaming firm. It features minute goblin-like creatures known as Kodas which were a crucial part of the performance.

Blackpink Emerges As Best Metaverse Performer at VMAs

Markedly, Eminem and Snoop Dogg used the MTV VMAs as a platform to circulate displays from their newly released music video tagged “From the D 2 the LBC.” The music video first premiered at an NFT event in New York. Snoop Dogg and Eminem occasionally appeared as partial animations in the music video which cut across different generations.

Significantly, Snoop Dogg and Eminem are two rappers who have used the Metaverse to their advantage. They are the first leading music artist who has utilized their BAYC NFTs in a performance. As part of raising Metaverse awareness, MTV VMA also added an award category tagged ‘Best Metaverse Performance.’ Nominees for this award were Justin Bieber, Twenty-One Pilots, Blackpink, BTS, Charli XCX, and Rift Tour which featured Ariana Grande. 

At the end of the event, Blackpink emerged as the winner of the ‘Best Metaverse Performance’ with her song The Virtual in PUBG which was backed by Lightspeed and Quantum. 

MTV VMAs hoped that the Metaverse show would push up its viewership which had drastically reduced over the years. The recorded live stream viewership for the show was 900,000 which was still a decrease from what it used to be. As of 2011, the channel had a viewership of about 1.2 million.