Yuga Labs’ Apefest is the future of festivals. It’s less about what happened at their 5th year in Las Vegas during ComplexCon and more about what happens before and after.
Composability is key to any festival or community’s longevity. After 15 years of covering live events, I see most people stay within their own friend groups that don’t mix often enough with others. Apefest brings together tens of thousands of apes who connect year-round on X, Discord, and Telegram, building relationships across communities that blend widely online and reflect deeper in person. People recognized each other not so much by their face, but by voice, pseudonym, and how they’ve shown up online and for the community. The mix of disparate connections was something I’d never seen before at a festival, but will much more in the future.
Yuga’s metaverse play, The Otherside, will only amplify that experience greatly online and off.
Decentralized discovery. I shopped the concept around to every ape that would listen at Apefest Las Vegas, but none bit. I’m not the best sales man, I’m not going to sell it here, but I’ve got a good example of its most importance.
There were three after parties that weekend I went to, and the music was consistently a neglected afterthought. So much it was comical. Friday took the cake. Imagine an empty hotel ballroom with a few round tables, chairs around them, and people scattered around waiting for the dj that didn’t end up setting up until after we left. And that night had some of the better music playing on aux.
Getting a half decent dj is a good, simple option, but Yuga should take it two steps further.
First, imagine collecting every ape’s listening history from the past year or more, then using recommender tech like collaborative filtering to craft a mix that connects them through shared tastes and helps build a narrative for the night.
The second step would be to decentralize how a DJ or music programmer is selected for the festival through pattern matching their talents with the apes’ music tastes. Not just in style but in creative potential.
In 2022, I programmed content for Meta’s live commerce team on Instagram and Facebook, which initially got me thinking about how well money represents value. It’s like trying to gauge how well popularity represents it. Both are good correlations, but is there a better way? NFTs like Bored Ape Yacht Club connect creativity and capital closely, but how much value shows up in that connection?
I don’t have the answer, but it’s a fundamental question Yuga and web3 is answering. At Apefest, I met all kinds of people, more on the money side than the creative, but that balance of creative and capital is what will propel both for the future.
One person I met, a Kenyan artist, uses silk threading for a cause greater. Raising awarness for people’s neurodiversity and special needs. I love how he describes it below, but see it in person. Mesmerizing.
