28: Adam Arrigo—The Show Must Go Beyond

Flux fandom. In today's episode Alice talks with Adam Arrigo, co-founder and CEO of Wave, a live virtual concert company. Adam has been pushing the frontier of music his whole life, from touring as a musician to designing Rockband the game at Harmonix. In 2016 Adam and Aaron Lemke founded Wave. Along the way the company has evolved and worked with artists including Imogen Heap, Kill the Noise, Tokimonsta, Galantis, Rezz, John Legend and the Weeknd. Today Wave distributes imaginative, interactive shows across platforms, from MMO games to Twitch, Youtube and TikTok. Wave just closed a Series B with Justin Bieber and J Balvin investing.  Adam gets into how the core insights around design and interactivity from the early days of VR are critical to the product today, and how he's reimagining the medium of concerts from the ground up. He explains how the pandemic has created a challenge for artists but also an opportunity for Wave to serve them. Adam discusses business models and monetization, from virtual goods to tipping. We cover trends in Asia such as the VTuber phenomenon, how companies like Riot and Epic in the U.S. are pushing the industry forward, and the new crop of creative virtual IP startups. Adam shares how the metaverse can be a beautiful and liberating place and gives advice to founders at the frontier—on how to build something that defies classification and how to find a team of passionate Avengers who align with your vision of the future.  Full transcript on Medium. This episode was produced by Dan Bouza.