Audio-First #10: The Metaverse, Apple M&A, and Quarantine Diversions Audio-First

[Listen above (& podcast apps), read below, or both if you’re feeling crazy]
Welcome back audio nerds! I hope you’re well in these trying times. I also hope last time’s deep-dive on Brazilian music was fruitful. For me, it’s been very necessary to stay positive.
As the coronavirus went from Faraway Problem to Very Real Threat, things are no doubt profoundly weird. But there’s some comfort in the fact that it’s weird for everybody. That we’re all in this.
Most of us are lucky enough to be insulated from the real medical emergency, and the relative comfort is eerie in its own right. But you get accustomed to it fast. I mean, last night I ate dinner while in the bathtub. Meanwhile, I have friends working in NYC emergency rooms.
Compounding on this bizarreness is the sense of time-travel. If you’re young, this a peek into what life will be like retired. If you’re quarantining with a significant other, it’s like hitting fast-forward to marriage. And then there’s the looming pandemic, which feels like something History Book People agonized over, like Hades or scurvy. (A testament to human achievement, in a way.)
We’re living in one giant, collective anachronism. 
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Audio-First has been slowly stumbling towards a Grand Unifying Theory of Media. I’m not there yet, but we previously reduced it to “mind control.” That’s effectively the game for creators: how desirable was your mind control? As the neuroeconomist Paul Zak notes, “A good story’s a good story from the brain’s perspective, whether it’s audio or video or text. It’s the same kind of activation in the brain.” 
Recently, hearing Gavin Baker talk about The Metaverse added a new layer of perspective:
“The metaverse is simply a series of connected virtual worlds I firmly believe the majority of people will spend a majority of their waking hours within my lifetime. Today, most of those worlds are called video games. And I would say The Metaverse being the culmination of the internet is a relatively accepted opinion amongst early-stage venture investors and large technology companies...as you see a DJ named Marshmello did a concert in Fortnite that 40M people watched. There's a special Star Wars event. There’s already events regularly in every video game. I’m more and more convinced that video games will be foundational to the metaverse. One signpost there is we have a lot of data on internet traffic. According to Verizon, Video Game traffic is up 100%. And Telecom Italia saw video game traffic up 75% and social media traffic up 0% because people are connecting through video games.”
The full picture here is that audio (and anything Audio-First) is part of an umbrella of media-tech that allows you to enter a virtual world. Listening to a podcast like Serial is quite a bit different than a persistent virtual world like Fortnite. But fundamentally, and neuroscientifically, they’re on the same spectrum. They compete for mindshare.
Now if you’ve read Snow Crash, you know there’s 3 different ways to access the proverbial Metaverse: high-quality home VR, grainy public arcade-style VR, or for the real addicts, a portable headset. (Eerily similar to what we have today). What attracted me to audio & audio-first tech is that the third portable option has seen a lot of momentum technologically–airpods, music streaming, podcasting, voice assistants, generative audio, conversational AI–these all seem to be converging on a compelling virtual world that’s portable. Sure, it’s not complete immersion like our home system. But it delivers something that only requires 70%-attention, allowing us to get a taste of the giant computer-storyteller-machine while going about our day. 
That’s why I wrote in edition #4 that the reason I’m ‘long’ audio is because I’m ‘long’ distracted consumption. There’s just a shocking amount of surface area unlocked.
With COVID-19, however, this is short-term a bad break