Filming Virtual Reality can be eye-wateringly expensive, with The New York Times said to have spent up to $100,000 a minute on its recent VR film The Displaced. Little wonder that U2 and Muse’s excursions into VR were backed by Apple, its $200bn cash pile and a corporate taste in music.
Put like this, the appeal of combining Virtual Reality and music seems at first glance like an expensive trinket to sit alongside 4K TVs in the home of the rich and easily swayed. But dig a little deeper into VR and a new thread emerges, where independent artists are driving experimentation in a technology that could – depending on who you talk to – transform music listening itself, reinvent the music video, fundamentally change live music or fade out again like just another fad.