Music’s Next Dimension: AmazeVR Reimagines the VR Concert Experience, Connecting Fans with Artists They Love

LA-based AmazeVR has dedicated the last five years to perfecting the VR concert. It’s more than a tech upgrade; it’s a radically new medium that connects music lovers with the artists they love. 

That claim may sound over the top—until you experience a VR concert for yourself. AmazeVR has spent years developing the bleeding-edge tech to make music performances pop. The results go beyond anything else available to music fans today. In an AmazeVR concert, the artist meets your gaze. They are right there, within reach, moving with you through an impossibly cool world. You’re not interacting with a cartoonish avatar; you see a moving, breathing person. You’re not just catching a show from multiple, distant angles through a headset; you’re doing things no one could ever do in a hall or arena. You’re together with other fans in the same physical space, but completely immersed in your own experience.

The team behind this innovation unites keen business and tech savvy, thanks to execs who took South Korean mobile platform Kakao to a $49bil market cap, with a larger-than-life flair for entertainment nurtured in LA. “Music can really come to life in VR,” explains AmazeVR co-CEO Ernest Lee. “It’s deeply human and draws on that human connection. You feel more invested and part of the music if you can let it surround you, if you’re immersed in it,” something hard to achieve online or live.   

To reach every fan with the most elevated experience possible, AmazeVR is bringing VR concerts to movie theaters around the US, providing all the cutting-edge technology fans need to jump into the action and savor the moment with their idols.

Before homing in on VR Concerts, AmazeVR experimented widely with VR’s capabilities, knowing the power of its storytelling potential and iterating to find just the right content. 
AmazeVR tried several approaches they hoped would fan the embers of consumer VR interest and set the industry alight. To get there, they needed content. And to make the high-quality content they envisioned, they needed better tech tools, tools that simply didn’t exist. So they built them. 

“To make this meaningful content, we needed to develop our own tech, because the highest visual fidelity is of utmost importance in VR,” explains co-CEO Steve Lee. “Our core tech is live action capture, which allows people to feel like they are meeting someone. We had to build our own cameras and game engine and use AI to automate tasks and decrease the work and budget. We needed these advancements to make high-caliber VR content because it requires high-end content creation both on the creative and tech side.” 

Over the next several years, they built a popular app and started seeding it with unique content, in the hopes it might grow into a Netflix for VR that created unique, technologically dazzling content in house, as well as working with other production studios. Yet the VR market, always on the edge of taking off, struggled, and the AmazeVR team did some soul searching. They saw there was one place, one kind of content that really seemed to connect: musical performances. 

Ernest, a concert-loving former Green Beret, recalls catching a U2 show in Munich while serving overseas. The show came back to him a few years later, when a friend gave him a Cardboard VR headset and he caught U2 on VR—and it blew his mind. “At the concert, I had nosebleed seats; but in VR, Bono was within arm's reach, closer than even the front row,” Lee remembers. “I felt this visceral reaction, that this was going to change how we tell stories and connect with artists.” Ernest eventually landed with the company that became AmazeVR, working closely with co-CEO Steve Lee, a seasoned tech executive who shared his wonder and added a serious business edge to the equation. 

Music artists have a presence that’s hard to capture in only two dimensions. Live shows also have their limitations, as artists can only be in one place at one time and even front row seats are not as close as VR. Livestreams can feel flat. AmazeVR invented another way, a new addition to music experiences that embraces the emotional power of live concerts and the fantastic possibilities of VR worlds. Artists can do more than play or sing or dance. They can take fans on a flying tour over mountains, dive with them into seemingly infinite cities, or move with them in an intimate space made of living plants, shimmering mercury, or anything else you can imagine. 

“The beauty of VR is that it allows people to expand their own experiences, not just watch content. VR concerts really push the tech forward and provide new value to fans,” explains Steve Lee. “When we put on that headset, we can have the feeling of a space or a unique environment, while we’re meeting our favorite artists.” 

AmazeVR is starting in the US and in movie theaters to break down one of the key barriers to wider adoption of VR: access to headsets. But VR concerts have a role to play in the increasingly global interest in music, bringing popular artists to overlooked markets and engaging more fans in more places. “It’s exciting for the US but the global opportunity is even more exciting for me,” says Ernest Lee. “People all over the world will be able to experience these artists, in places that value music highly but may not see as many international tours. For many artists, it’s hard to reach a global audience. It’s gotten easier thanks to 2D technologies, but it’s not like being right there with someone. You need to honor the art and maintain its human element, and VR allows you to do that.” 

AmazeVR’s vision and ambition for the new medium, still barely in its infancy, have finally gotten traction, as VR and metaverse experiences take off and music lovers seek new, deeper connections with the artists they adore. “We devoted our lives to this. We’ve been waiting and waiting, through a tough VR winter,” reflects Steve Lee. “Recently, it’s game time. It’s a good stress to have.