Abstract

This paper examines secondlife.com as an example of one of the highly popular participatory media sites onto which people enroll in order to network with other people as well as to experience life in a virtual world as avatars. The goal of this research is to study and explain the complex relationship of contemporary music practices on participatory media websites, where the praxis of popularity, virtual live performances and social networking sheds new light on the process of gaining value. This will be achieved by examining the issues of live performance and protocols on Secondlife, the social networking sites, such as Slusic, and the discourse on the blogs directly linked to the live performance aspect of Secondlife.