Angelbaby, the world’s first metastar, or fully virtual artist native to the metaverse, will take fans on a journey in Austin this March, performing as part of SXSW. Fans and curious music lovers can enter a dome structure and join the metastar on a fully immersive whirlwind experience.

SXSW attendees can catch  The ANGELBABY Experience: A Metastar Showcase at the FLUF Dome World (313 Red River) on March 12-15th, 2022. Angelbaby will perform three showcases a day.. The experience is free for any SXSW badge (recommended but not required) or FCFS for community members holding FLUF, PB, Thingie, or ASM; VIP Lanyards and special traits get priority access.

Angelbaby is part of Hume, the first NFT music label and entertainment studio launched in September 2021. Hume represents a collective of creatives from the present and artists from the future it calls metastars. Metastars do what all big artists do: make killer tracks, play great shows, gain an obsessive fan following. In 5 months, Angelbaby, for example, blew the crowd away at Art Basel Miami,shared the stage with TPain and Chromeo at a recent Superbowl Party in LA and has over 1 million dollars in NFT’s on the market

But metastars do what artists can’t. They can be everywhere at once, including in virtual worlds. They can sell out drop after NFT drop of custom scenes for FLUF World, reward token-holding fans with perks both digital and IRL, and continue to tease new music—all while fighting for the metaverse to remain free. 

“Angelbaby and Hume are pushing storytelling and entertainment boundaries. The tech is just a part of it,” explains Jay Stolar of Hume. “The real point is what you do with it, with the connections and excitement that can get several hundred people to fly in for the debut of an NFT artist, or snap up an airdrop, after this artist has only been out there for a few months.”

“There’s a lot of talk out there about NFT record label this, and virtual artist that. But it’s all talk,” says AngelBaby. “We’re already here. We’re real. While they’re still talking, we’re already doing it.”

About Hume

Hume is the world’s first NFT label and metastar studio. They represent the Hume Collective, a posse of hybrid virtual-physical artists known as Metastars. They have spawned a label and entertainment studio to create metastars with a universe of stories behind them. Hume is building a new model for how music, entertainment, and storytelling can intertwine in web3.

The world’s first NFT metastar Angelbaby is back, performing at the upcoming FLUF Haus party to celebrate the Super Bowl on February 11, 2022 in LA. The force from the future will take over the Petersen Automotive Museum, along with other performers, artists, and a whole slew of FLUFs and Party Bears. (See here for full details on the event, COVID measures, and qualifying tokens.)

Angelbaby is part of the Hume Collective, a group dedicated to preserving the open metaverse. Hume are artists, producers, beatmakers, and troublemakers bringing the wisdom of the future to the party people of the present. Some are your fellow humans, while some are beings that bridge the virtual reality of the metaverse with our physical everyday lives, hybrid beings called “portals.” 

“Some might mistake Hume metastars for the virtual artists of the recent past,” explains Hume Collective representative David Beiner, “but Angelbaby is their own thing. They are calling the shots and they want to rile things up, in the metaverse and real life.”

It’s no surprise Angelbaby is returning to FLUF Haus, a follow up to their unforgettable debut at the FLUF Haus at Art Basel Miami. Since they appeared on the scene late last year with tracks like “NFT”. The metastar has been a close ally of the FLUFs, the around 10,000 unique 3D rabbits that live on the blockchain and inhabit a multi-layered virtual playground called FLUF World. Angelbaby has released scenes and sounds for these FLUFs, with drops selling out in mere seconds. 

For FLUF Haus parties, AngelBaby takes over the venue’s screen for a wild ride through the metaverse that gets IRL crowds bouncing. “I can’t wait  to perform for the fluffle again, for the Humies, for the open metaverse. New music, new stage.. it's gonna be wild,” AngelBaby enthuses. 

About Hume

Hume, a transformative web3 entertainment company, is revolutionizing community-powered storytelling through hybrid virtual-physical artists. David Beiner (tech and media strategist), and Jay Stolar (singer and songwriter who has worked with superstars like Selena Gomez) are representatives in the hume collective. A world for metastars, music culture, NFT communities, and imagined futures to live in all under one roof: "We Are Hume, We Are Many".

“We Are Hume, We Are Many”: The Hume Collective Introduces its First Metastars

Hume Collective are a posse of hybrid virtual-physical artists and freedom fighters from the distant (but relatable) future, struggling to keep the metaverse open for self-expression. Joined by collective members from our time, they have spawned a virtual label and entertainment studio to create metastars with a universe of stories behind them. Together, they are building a new model for how music, entertainment, and storytelling can intertwine in web3. 

After several (future) centuries of hints, the collective has just introduced its first artist, Angelbaby, who dropped their first party-ready single “NFT” in November and played their first show at FLUF House at Art Basel Miami. The collective just dropped an Angelbaby-inspired FLUF World scene that sold out in less than 30 seconds. They handed out POAPs (participation tokens) to fans that granted them special access to new backgrounds and avatar swag. And this is barely the beginning.  “It’s been a hell of a future,” says Angelbaby. “We’re not going to hide anymore. We want everyone to know that we are here and we are many.” 

The collective chose tech and media strategist David Beiner and executive producer and songwriter Jay Stolar as their representatives in the present, the dawn of the metaverse. Before joining the collective, Beiner and Stolar were fast friends for years, jamming together and developing crazy tracks and quirky stories and characters to go with them. Stolar, though working with or writing for name artists like Aloe Blacc and Selena Gomez, was frustrated with the treatment of producers and songwriters in the industry. As their antics evolved, these two streams converged. They realized they were on the brink of something truly new: a virtual artist (back before it was cool). 

“We had discussions with a major label back in 2019, before anyone else had come out with virtual artists, to sign some of our characters,” explains Beiner. “They eventually offered us a deal. It was a bad deal. We turned it down.”

Beiner and Stolar kept thinking about virtual artists as more and more experiments emerged, from Lil Miquela to Hatsune Miku. They kept seeing the same worn track through the uncanny valley. None of the artists had real stories, and fans felt it. “As we watched all the virtual artists in the space over the next few years, we found people didn’t resonate for one consistent reason. Their backstories were shallow,” Stolar recounts. “They’d get fan questions on social media and be playing catch up. It all felt fake. They needed to have the core human elements that we connect to as people.”

Then, after a chance run-in at a backwoods rave in the Angeles National Forest, they encountered the virtual/physical hybrid beings (called “portals”) of the Hume Collective, an underground arts resistance organization from a thousand years in the future. The collective had landed in our day after being pursued throughout the metaverse for centuries by the Xani Republic, a reactionary, restrictive group of highly militarized virtual beings. They connected, inducting Beiner and Stolar into the collective. 

As Beiner and Stolar explored the Hume Collective and its tales, they knew they had the perfect artists and stories to demonstrate how music culture, NFT communities, and imagined futures could blend into a new generation of metastars. These metastars form the perfect bridge between virtual and IRL music experiences, merging the virtual into the real. “As storytellers, we want to provide a world for fans where they can put themselves into the story, so that the word 'character' never occurs to them. The artists of the Hume Collective aren’t ‘characters.’ They are individuals who fans are really starting to love.”

That love has attracted investors from both the crypto/web3 space (gmoney, Delphi Digital) and the music industry, leading to a $2.5 million seed round. It has translated into fan excitement that spans traditional music consumption methods and web3. The Hume Collective artists can take full advantage of the music industry set up for flesh-and-blood performers, while moving seamlessly into the fast-shifting world of web3, with its drops, digital collectibles, PFPs, and exploding creativity. 

“A web3 label breaks down the barriers between entities that you had to work with to be a web2 celebrity,” explains Stolar. “A web3 record label with a metastar has everything under one roof. That is something that I’ve been dreaming about since I was 13, when I realized how many people who were at odds with each other it took to do something in the music business. We can leave that archaic and inefficient system behind now.”

Web3 flexibility is easy for artists like Angelbaby, who function equally well on a physical stage and in an environment like Fluf World. “Web3 is moving so quickly that you really need to be ready to shift every single day,” says Beiner. “Your story is open, the tech is open, everything is open. You’re a member of a wider community and if you stay too rigid about what it should be, everyone will fly by you. It’s unfolding at a pace that has ever happened before,” It’s fast, but nothing a crew of time-hopping future bad asses can’t handle.