For audiences in cubicles, sucking down media dripfeeds, virtual nightclubbing no longer sounds just inevitable, but already exists. Witness the auctioneer fitness of the virtual spaceship bought for $100,000, being set up as a virtual marketplace and nightclub within the online multiplayer game Entropia. ( and enough with the weirdness of virtual real estate, virtual economies… virtual bank cards… but yes, google them if unfamaliar with how crazy that terrain is getting) Seems like a place for daft punks, but maybe it’ll offer a more compelling integration with our lives than the games already morphing millions of online players into machine gun wielding, medieval sword thrusting or magical potion spraying addicts?

Back in the twentieth century, Cold-Cut agreed to do a live audiovisual netcast from London to the Electrofringe 1999 festival in Newcastle – which excited the crap out of us as organisers, and which was facilitated in part by the sheer luck of having an electronic music loving ISP owner sponsoring the festival with bandwidth, and coincidentally having a warehouse next to our main venue, which meant we could just physically roll a high speed cable into our venue. Most loved the netcast idea, but some were disappointed – who expressed ‘this kind of thing’ could spell a problem for future local music, with big name stars being merely piped in from afar all the time. Luckily it doesnt need to be an either / or scenario… and for that event, we tried to make both co-exist – with a post-netcast 2way jam online using software by elefant traks called DASE ( which allowed online jamming via a 56k modem back in 99 folks! ) and resrocket(.com) – which after 6 months of tests and trials, fell down on the night because someone was asleep in San Francisco who needed to open some server…. anywaysssss… the 3D grime-lord avatars kicking down the pixel doors, make all that seem a little quaint now…

And don’t you just know these places are going to be crawling with Mp3 Bloggers?