TFMJonny is a full-time VTuber content creator with more than a million subscribers on YouTube and TikTok, but also does Twtich livestreams, releases music on Spotify, and has a background in acting, voices acting, and improv (more links are here on his Linktree). It’s a journey that started with live singing within The Great Pug in VRChat, and then transitioned into livestreaming his performances, and eventually into a long-form and short-form video content on all of the major platforms. He uses VRChat to embody different characters as a VTuber, and engage with people via chat roulette platforms like Omegle in a way that blends the virtual and the physical.
He stars in a music video of his song Like Crazy that was featured at Raindance Immersive 2024, and I had a chance to catch up him to learn more about his journey into VR, how he helped to start the Star Collective talent group of live performers in VRChat, and finally his recent focus on community building and how he’s leveraging beta access to VRChat’s creator economy to experiment with a monitized TFMJonny VRChat group to host meetups with his supporters. We move from the evolution of live performance in VRChat, catching the VTubing waves, while also navigating the ever-shifting landscape of content creation with the focus moving from long-form to short-form content where the revenue models and algorithmic tunings are all still in flux.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So I'm continuing my series of looking at different films and experiences that were being shown at Raindance Immersive 2024, and it's a really great opportunity for me to talk to a lot of folks from the VRChat community to get a little bit more of the history of VRChat, but also to look at some of the different cultural dynamics that And also, you know, how do people make a living in and around virtual reality, but specifically VRChat? So TFM Johnny is a full-time content creator on YouTube and TikTok, where he has well over a million subscribers on each of those platforms. He also does live streaming. And now he's become a VTuber. And it sort of happened in a natural evolution as someone who's using virtual reality as a medium, going into these different VRChat public worlds and doing these songs and performances. And eventually, someone suggested to him to start streaming some of these different performances and then From there, starting to expand out into all these other different platforms. And so he actually has early beta access to the VRChat creator economy and has a monetized group. And so we talk about his journey into VR, a little bit of the history of live performance within VRChat, but also the changing landscape of content creation and all the different ways that you kind of have to hustle to make ends meet as a full-time content creator, but also using virtual reality as a platform to find new ways of connecting to your community. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR Podcast. So this interview with TFM Johnny happened on Friday, July 5th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:47.862] TFMJonny: Yeah. So my name is TFM Johnny. I am a YouTuber, TikTok creator, streamer. And I am now a V tuber apparently as well. I didn't start out as a V tuber, it just kind of happened. I started out in 2018 as a VR creator. And that kind of just morphed into being a virtual YouTuber or a VTuber, which has taken off in the entertainment industry today. So I do everything from many different characters and comedy and also, in this case, music, which is a project that I think we're going to be talking quite a bit about today is my latest music project that I just released.
[00:02:30.891] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into becoming a VTuber.
[00:02:36.249] TFMJonny: Absolutely. So I was a VR enthusiast in 2017, 2018. I hopped into VRChat and kind of checked it out and basically saw that there was a potential for performance, live performance in this social VR space of VRChat. And so I immediately tasked myself with figuring out how exactly to do that and this was 2018 we just barely had gotten full body trackers in vr chat and that technology was just starting in its infancy and i looked at that and said what would it take to create live performance in vr just as a musician, as a creator. And that's where I started as a creator, was essentially just loading up every night into VRChat and hopping on a stage in the Great Pug and just performing music for people in full body tracking in VRChat. And nobody was doing that back then, and there were a lot of problems that I had to solve along the way. And then somewhere in there, people were just like, well, why aren't you streaming? You should stream this. And that's when I started Twitch. and did that for a couple of years. And then as everybody remembers in 2020, the pandemic happened, and it just so happened that that was sort of a right place, right time for a lot of internet creators. A lot of creators blew up in that time period, and I was one of those creators as well. And that's kind of when the transition to VTubing happened. And it wasn't so much that I purposefully did that and decided, okay, I'm a VTuber now. I'm going to use a virtual avatar. I'm going to go outside of VRChat. And I'm going to just in general start being a creator with an avatar. It was more so that myself and many others, we just sort of transitioned from VRChat into just becoming VTubers.
[00:04:23.493] Kent Bye: Well, going back and seeing some of your early videos and trends and phases within the context of your journey of being broadly a content creator using virtual reality as a medium, but now popularly called VTubing. So you were doing a lot of comedy-based work or character-driven work or doing these kind of Omegle interactions where Omegle being the website where you would randomly and have these one-on-one conversations. So maybe talk about like your journey creatively in terms of finding your voice and your character and the type of comedic genre content that you were really going for.
[00:05:01.806] TFMJonny: Yeah, absolutely. So along with being a creator and a VTuber, I do have an extensive acting background as well. So I've spent many years honing my craft as an actor and as an improviser. And that kind of all came together in early 2020 when I decided I was going to start doing an Omegle series. I hadn't seen anybody in the VRChat VTuber space really do anything like that yet. And it wasn't like I invented the genre of Omegle YouTube. It had been established many, many years before with many creators like, for example, The Dew, who is a guy who is faceless. He doesn't show his face, and he just goes on Omegle, and he would play his guitar. for people on Omegle and do different songs and just dazzle people with his talent. And so I thought, well, what if we take VRChat, something that in 2020, not a lot of people had seen, and basically start essentially VTubing on Omegle and get people's reactions to that. And at the time, nobody was really doing that. And immediately, I can remember actually doing the first Omegle video And I sent the rough cut to a friend of mine who is also a very well-established YouTuber. And just like, what do you think of this? And keep in mind, this was back when I had like 3000 YouTube subscribers. Like it was, I was a very small channel at the time. And she looked at it and went, you have something here, finish it, release it. It's going to be huge. I'm like, Okay, sure. And what turned out to be years and years of experience as an actor and as an improviser mixed in with the VR V tubing aspect with VR chat and just the zany characters that you can come up with doing that stuff. It just completely melded together into something that just worked and it took off. It was huge. It exploded literally immediately. She was 100% correct. It was something new that people hadn't really seen before. And I did that for about two, two and a half years. I'm currently on hiatus from that series, but I'm hoping to pick it up again soon. But yeah, it was just basically interacting with people completely at random and just showing them that this platform existed. And immediately the reactions you would get to that were just, I mean, you can see it in the videos. They're amazing. People are just completely taken back by interacting with a virtual person. And you're not limited by your human body. You can become anything you can imagine. And it really comes down to just embodying that character and voice acting that character in a way that fits, that gets people excited and laughing and smiling. And that's really what the Omegle series was for me when I was developing it and creating it.
[00:07:51.704] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's this really interesting contrast between the virtual and the physical, where you have the blending of the realities and the clash of those two realities come together. And I think a lot of that being at the moment of time, a lot of that shock value where people, this would have been for a lot of folks, their very first interaction with the virtual being or what is essentially a person. So it's not a virtual being in the sense of AI, it's a person. And so this confusion of like, am I interacting with a person or is it an AI? Like, at that point, the AI wasn't as good as it is now to maybe start to mimic that. So people having this epiphanic moment. So there's a lot of that initial shock value, but there's also like in order to sustain it, you have to have like these characters or these scenes or things that have some element of humor or you start singing to them. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts of getting past that initial kind of shock value. And then, okay, now we have that. Now, where do you take it from here to start to then explore other dimensions of what is interesting about this clash of realities.
[00:08:54.850] TFMJonny: Yeah, I mean, honestly, everybody was just so hungry for human interaction during the pandemic. There was the shock value of, oh my God, I'm interacting with a virtual being, but it was more so just people wanted to talk and people wanted to interact and they wanted to do, you know, they wanted that unique interaction. And I didn't really approach that series with the idea of it's all about the virtual avatar. what it really was about was playing around with characters and who who could they interact with and the virtual avatar was more of a tool in that tool set i mean you could do the exact same omegle series that i did just with costumes and makeup in a traditional irl sense but what the avatars allowed me to do was to kind of break out and explore that even deeper and even further One of my biggest characters, one of my most popular characters is a child version of me. And, you know, you really couldn't do that as a cosplay or as a costume or in makeup. And it really comes down to this whole new... I view it as kind of this whole new way of acting similar to, you know, what James Cameron pioneered with Avatar and various other movies with motion capture is you're still acting. The core principles are still there. You're embodying a character, but you're taking it a step further because you're breaking outside of your own body's limitations, essentially. And it's kind of this weird sort of valley between two peaks of voice acting and sort of motion acting or like motion capture acting similar to like what um oh what's his name andy andy sirx am i saying that right i think yeah exactly so like it's kind of this sort of mix of both crafts coming together And I mean, we've seen it in Hollywood, this specific sort of actor where it's like this motion capture actor is this new sort of defining genre of acting. And now we're seeing it in the VTuber space where for the most part, in varying degrees, that's essentially what VTubers are doing as well, is using these virtual avatars to act and portray characters on the fly using motion capture technology and just sheer voice acting skills, it's not a mistake that a lot of VTubers, a lot of the top VTubers in the industry right now are actually well-established voice actors because it's not hard to make that leap, which has been really interesting to watch happen. And it's turned out to be a very great side gig for a lot of professional voice actors because of that. And just that's what it's always been to me is just sort of, this workshop of just these two worlds coming together of studying movement and studying voice acting and just melding that together and exploring what characters you can create with that and how you interact with people in that way.
[00:11:58.332] Kent Bye: In terms of the different voices, is that all from just pure voice acting or are you using any external software to help pitch bend or modulate your voice at all?
[00:12:08.126] TFMJonny: I would say 95% of the work I've done has all been completely voice acting. There are very few times where it's, it's very obvious I'm using a voice changer when I do use one. For example, I did an Omegle series for a little bit there where I was Vecna from Stranger Things. And of course I used a voice changer for that. And it was all tied into a sponsorship I had with a certain service that does voice changing. So... I have dabbled in that. And for me, it's not about using it as a crutch. It's about using it as yet another tool. How do you take something like a voice modification and build it into a character? And for me, I can't just use something like that as a crutch. I want to explore. If I can do it with my voice, I want to do it with my voice. But yeah.
[00:12:57.642] Kent Bye: Okay. So when you were a kid, then that's just you. Oh yeah.
[00:13:02.425] TFMJonny: I made all sorts of noises as a kid. It got me into trouble more often than not. But yeah, I was one of those kids that just would make weird noises, would mimic things, would watch a movie and I would learn all the lines to it and I would regurgitate them. And that got me in trouble a lot. I'm sure. Uh, but That was just me. That was just me growing up as a kid and that craft, that skill turned into a career for me.
[00:13:27.944] Kent Bye: Okay. And just to clarify, I was talking about when you're playing the kid version of yourself, that's just you also using your voice acting.
[00:13:36.323] TFMJonny: yes absolutely yeah yeah baby johnny hi gotcha okay the most kindest calmest and that's probably why it worked in the pandemic because everybody was just looking for that escape and just coming across this happy little guy that didn't know where he was that just stumbled on omegle and if you know the type of cytomegal is It was kind of this like mishmash of two completely different vibes and completely different worlds. And, you know, just seeing people light up and smile when that tiny little voice would come out and they'd just be like, oh, hi. Like, what are you doing? And, you know, I'd be in like a Minecraft house or something and just be like, yeah, I'm just playing Minecraft. Like, what's going on? And just lighting up people's day was just so much fun. That's what I loved about doing those projects so much.
[00:14:25.529] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, let's go back to the singing part, because I know that you were involved with a number of other singing projects or at least trying to bring the community together through like the Star Collective and other projects within the context of VRChat. So maybe take me back to like you're back in the pug doing these performances and a lot of friction around like what's it mean for VRChat? you as a performer to be in these random public spaces in VRChat. And then what was the catalyst for you to start to then have a little bit more structure or order or to try to bring the community together a little bit more when it comes to singing within the context of VRChat?
[00:15:00.574] TFMJonny: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if we rewind back to 2018, when I first entered VRChat, I came in during the Knuckles era like a lot of people in 2018. But I immediately saw through worlds like Open Mic Night that there was this flourishing musician community that was starting to grow within VRChat in 2018. So just through hopping around to different worlds and performing, I met a number of different people who became good friends. And we noticed that at the time, like back then, we certainly didn't have anything like VRChat groups or any sort of community projects that would amplify communities within VRChat. And quite literally, we just went, well, everybody's fragmented and scattered. And we, you know, everybody's just kind of jamming out between these public worlds. There's no cohesion. And so we immediately started building a community which became Star Collective, which grew into the largest talent community in VRChat for many years. It changed its name, I believe, in 2019 or 2020 to Artifex. It rebranded, but essentially the core mission stayed the same, and that was to create a single gathering point for everybody in VRChat who wanted to participate in anything artistic, whether it was, you know, models or music or filmmaking or anything, and just bring it all under one roof. And that ran for many years until groups became a thing. And then Artifex wrapped up beginning of this year and I think it was the right time anyways for for essentially what was the largest talent community in VRChat to kind of wrap it up because at that point now in the current state of VRChat groups has kind of taken over and filled that void and I look at where things are now and I can't be happier for the music community in VRChat it's grown so much but you know I'm so honored to go back to those roots with my friends and say, you know, back then we created Star Collective. We created the first talent community in VRChat that grew to the size that it did and became the largest community. And that became the focal point for so many artists who have gone on to do some amazing, amazing things.
[00:17:14.491] Kent Bye: Okay. So yeah, that's like over six years now that you've been doing some form of different types of performances within VRChat, doing a lot of acting within the context of the content you're producing, but also singing. And so maybe you could just recount some of your favorite places or milestone performances that you see as maybe turning points in the evolution of you as a performer in the context of what's happening in the music scene, especially the live performance music scene.
[00:17:39.190] TFMJonny: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's grown so much. I can remember back in like 2018, 2019, you know, just performing every night in the Great Pug. Eventually, one night, inevitably, Owlboy came along. For people who don't know who Owlboy is, Owlboy created the Great Pug. And for quite a while there in the... in that era of vr chat in like 2018 2019 ran a role play bar and had staff and everything and that was sort of like the first major acknowledgement to what i was doing was when owlboy came along was like okay i'm gonna put some staff on for you and you know we're gonna kind of like acknowledge this as a legitimate event which was kind of cool and so that was kind of neat and then that grew from uh doing that going into 2020 when the Omegle series started to take off and that kind of music took a bit of a backseat, really sort of what, that's what propelled me as a creator was all of the acting stuff I was doing. But I was also still doing music at the time and just started working with a VR filmmaker, Acme Jack, and we produced a number of music videos through that era that went on my YouTube channel, just so I was still producing music and creating music. And through that time, that also put me on the map with organizations such as Hickey, who does virtual market. And I got asked several times to perform at music VCAT, do a concert at music VCAT. So that was a huge, huge honor and, you know, and a huge milestone in my career being asked by a major organization to perform a legitimate concert with a tech crew and all of this sort of stuff. And back then in about like 2021, even then still people were just playing their guitars and singing over their VR chat mics. You know, there really wasn't a huge production value to live performance. We had the DJ scene growing at the time, but the music community, live music community still hadn't really looked at what the DJ community was doing in VRChat and said, we can apply this here. And it wasn't until like the VCAP performances and all that, that people started considering, oh, well maybe instead of playing over our mic, we should use VRCDN and live stream the audio in high quality and have lighting and all this, like the DJs are doing. And now, We're sitting here in 2024, and that's just the norm now. And I'm so excited to see that vision come to life, because in 2018, that's what I envisioned when I first saw VRChat, when I first saw people performing in VRChat. I was like, you can have a full production in here. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. We have motion capture. You can put a performer on stage. We have the live streaming audio through the CDN. And so you can have high quality production level audio being piped out to people. And you can do so much with that as well. There's so many people experimenting with audio production in a virtual space. It seems like it'd be something simple. It's just like, oh, well, I just, pipe the audio into the world and you're done it's like no we've looked at projects like shelter for example which has for the dj scene completely developed out a whole audio production stack specifically for the spatial audio environment of vr and now we're seeing the live music side of things kind of take over that as well and we have big festivals um i just did forality for example which is i believe now the largest furry convention in the world i think they had Oh my goodness. I don't know how many participants they had this year. It was like over 22,000, 22,000, which I believe was large enough to make them the largest furry convention in the world. Now it's virtual, but I mean, to me, that doesn't matter personally. It's like, it doesn't matter if I'm in a convention hall or if I'm on VR chat, everything is still the same. You have your panels, you have your performances, you have your artist alley and all that sort of stuff that you would get at any convention. just because it's virtual doesn't change anything for me personally at least i'm still getting all of the same content all of you know everything that i would get out of convention and to do forality and see how far live performance in vr chat has come because like back in 2018 it was just me in a single 80 person lobby singing my heart out But doing Ferality, now you're playing for thousands of people and you have a hologram system for your avatar that retransmits you over multiple instances. You have camera crew, you have tech crew, audio crew. It had exploded into this huge thing now where we're getting into the professional realm of performance and production. And quite frankly, like some of the tech crew that work on these projects, IRL, that's what they do for a living. And so it's quite amazing to see how this space is just evolving into a traditional performance space where you don't have to make compromises anymore versus in 2018, where I was just this anime dude on a stage flailing around and singing. Now it's turned into this thing where Frankly, I'm surprised that no big names have come into an environment like VRChat yet to do a concert. We see it in Fortnite certainly, but there's something special about VR and the presence it gives you to see a major artist on stage performing I think would be really, really amazing and really cool. And we're there now. We have that technology. And the hurdle to put a performer into VR is less and less and less every day with the further advancements we make. So I'm really interested to see where it goes for sure, because we are reaching a point where it can just be another tool for promotion, especially in the music space.
[00:23:17.509] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I know with content creators, you have lots of different formats and outputs and different platforms that are out there. And just as I look at your link tree with all the different links that you have, there's the social media, like X formerly known as Twitter, and you have Instagram for photos, and you also have a Spotify link for the music. And there's also Twitch, which is the live stream, but there's been this kind of shift from like long form videos where you see stuff on YouTube to into the short form videos that you have both on TikTok and Instagram Reels, and also YouTube has shorts now. So I'd love to have you maybe just give a survey of the landscape of the different types of output that you have. And if you optimize from the beginning for short form videos now, like I know there's been a lot of shifts and changes, but maybe just give a little bit of a survey of the current landscape of content that you're creating. Yeah.
[00:24:08.413] TFMJonny: Yeah, so over the last, I'd say, six months, I did shift away to going on hiatus from kind of the traditional YouTube content I was making, mostly Omegle and some VRChat gaming content. And I shifted focus to music production again, just kind of, you know, take a break and cleanse the palate and try something new for a little while. And I partnered with Lydian Melody, who's an amazing guitarist and an amazing music producer, and also Hamster Alliance, who's another amazing, well-established music producer. And we sat down and we produced the new track, Like Crazy, which is now on all your music streaming services, like you mentioned Spotify and Apple Music and all that, that I have linked there. And then we decided that we were going to make a music video for this. So I reached out to Ariel Emerald at Archangel and we produced an amazing music video that got into Raindance Immersive. nominated for Best VR Music Video for 2024. Super, super honored for that nomination. And yeah, we just kind of put a whole bunch of really top creative people together and we were just like, what can we make out of this? And that's been kind of my focus for the last six months. Now I'm getting back into planning out a new season of Omegle content. We don't call it Omegle anymore because Omegle doesn't exist anymore. The site got shut down. But there's plenty of other Omegle clones out there that the Omegle YouTubers have gravitated over to. But the creator space right now is actually really in this weird place, I would say. And myself included, most creators right now are trying to feel their way through what the new sort of model is. There is no doubt in my mind now that coming out of the pandemic and the explosion in content that was created during the pandemic, the whole structure of the content creator industry has changed now and shifted towards short form. The problem with that is that Most creators are still trying to figure out, how do we make money from this? People get shocked all the time when I tell them, it's just like, oh, you have all these views on TikTok. You must be super rich. It's like, no, TikTok doesn't pay us anything. You make next to no money off a short form. Even ad revenue, I was looking and comparing on YouTube versus YouTube long form and YouTube shorts. And you need 10 to 50 times the views on a short to get the same amount of revenue you would out of the views on a long form video. It's just short form is not an ad revenue friendly model. And creators right now are trying to figure out, well, what does that mean? And I'm no exception to that. Certainly, I'm doing the exact same thing. And I don't think anybody really has figured out what the future model is for content creation yet. People are experimenting with things, but I really worry for the independent content creator space right now because 2024 started off and a lot of veteran YouTubers that have been around for 10 years either said at the beginning of this year, I quit, or they've said, I'm making less videos because the fact of the matter is that shorts in the YouTube space have massively undercutted long form content. People prefer to open up YouTube and just flip through some shorts. You know, think of somebody on like a 20 minute lunch break. You know, are you going to watch two long form YouTube videos or are you just going to sit there and flip through shorts for 20 minutes? And most people through the data that we have and that YouTube is shared, everybody's going to shorts. And that creates a problem for creators. How do we monetize that? And so for me, you look at my link tree and you're just like, wow, that's a lot of links. Well, it's because, you know, there's a lot of things going on as a creator right now to remain relevant and to stay afloat. If you're full-time like, like I am, I'm a full-time creator. And so for me personally, my main focus now has been going back to what I know best and that's community building. And as a content creator, that should be your number one job. A lot of people think, oh, it's about the videos. Oh, it's about making fun live streams. It's like, no, first and foremost, and I've said this for years as a content creator, as an independent content creator, your job is community building and building that identity and giving people a place to go kind of like a little clubhouse that they identify with, that they feel at home. And really, that's what I've shifted to, at least for now. And that has opened up all sorts of really interesting new doors. Recently, one of the things that we've done for years is a creator meetup in VRChat. So my fans can join on me and hang out with me in VRChat. And with Creator Economy and VRChat, we took that opportunity to extend that revenue model outside of you know patreon and twitch subscriptions and youtube memberships where we would normally monetize that way if you're a supporter on those platforms then you can come in and hang out with me and we extended that to creator economy and i just did that on a whim i'm just like let's try it let's see what happens and the devs i reached out to them and they're like yeah sure we'll give you creator economy because not everybody can get it right now and so they activated creator economy on my group and i was actually legitimately and i'm still every week i'm still shocked at how many people are actually using it and how many people are interacting with it i am a true firm believer that as a creator even outside of traditional content creation with like youtube as any sort of creator in the virtual space especially in vr chat creator economy is going to be a huge huge driver of revenue. And just even in a closed beta right now, which is what we're in, I am shocked at how many people are actually using it for something as simple for me as something as simple as, hey, pay a little bit and you can come hang out in a private instance with me and the rest of the community. And yeah, people are taking advantage of it way more than I imagined they would, which is really cool to see. It gives me a massive amount of hope for both creators and for the virtual space going forward.
[00:30:08.191] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's really great to hear. And I've done some other previous conversations kind of exploring where the creator economy is working, where it's not working. One of the comments that was said to me just after the VRChat layoffs was that the people who are really successful in the context of using VRChat to make money are these VR content creators like yourself who are like working full time. you're positioned in a way to have many different types of revenue streams diversified across these different platforms. So I'm curious for myself, just in terms of like how your income is sort of separated from these different income sources. For myself, I have a Patreon that I get anywhere from well over half to three quarters of all the income I get is from that. And then I have a lot of speaking fees and other stuff that I haven't really explored these other content platforms to have these other revenue streams, but just very curious to hear if you're willing to share as much as you can in terms of where their money coming from, what percentage you get from different platforms.
[00:31:09.625] TFMJonny: Yeah, well, when YouTube long form was still functioning very well, and I will say this, it does seem like, well, I can't say too much about metrics. YouTube did kind of go for an algorithmic model recently that was similar to TikTok. And that actually in the last, I want to say month or two, seems like they have shifted again and they might have realized through much feedback from creators, including myself, that it wasn't quite the right model for YouTube. And I'm happy to say at least that some indications I'm seeing is that YouTube has tweaked the algorithm to favor a little bit more long form again, which is what I think is the core of YouTube anyways. What made YouTube great was the community aspect of it and just the content that it offered so normally when youtube was in its traditional sort of form majority of my income came from ad revenue on youtube but that has shifted with short form and so i pursued other things like sponsorships i've got a number of different sponsorships with different companies that are probably now my more major source of revenue And that shouldn't surprise anyone. Like in the short form space, that's pretty much how you make money. If you're a TikToker with millions of followers, you're not making money from TikTok. You're making money from corporate sponsorships and advertising products or doing merch deals. And that's another thing I've worked with companies like makeshift, which do these cute little plushies. I was actually, I believe their first VTuber ever to work with them back in 2021. and since then i've done a number of campaigns with them and so it's kind of like what the music industry went through in 2000s and in the 2010s where the whole revenue model shifted away from selling physical media And it went towards selling tickets to shows and to selling merch. And that's how today most people in the music industry make money because, you know, you're not getting rich off of music streaming. That's for sure. I think it was Snoop Dogg recently who released a track and got payment for it. And he said publicly, he's like, I went to my management and I was looking at the check going, this is it. Like this is all we made. And they're like, yeah, this is normal for the music streaming industry. We don't make money off of music streaming now. And so like the creator space as well is kind of going through that shift where it's like ad revenue used to be your big money maker on YouTube long form, but that has now shifted. And now it's about getting those sponsors getting the merch deals and you know you spoke to it yourself speaker fees and stuff like that that live performance and myself as well i charge for music appearances when i go to do music performances unless it's for something like charity for example those obviously i would certainly continue to do for free forever but but if it's just for like a club or an appearance or something yeah you know i charge for that that all of that is going into the pot to pay my bills and everything is a full-time creator It's just shifted and it's kind of diluted certainly over the years because it used to be, you know, I just make a video, put it up on YouTube and I get ad revenue. Yay. And maybe I get a Patreon as well. But now it's really turned into a traditional, more traditional hustle where you have to go out, you have to meet with sponsors, you have to figure out what your community wants for merch, physical merch. And that's, That's what's going to generate your revenue for you now. And it's been a really interesting paradigm shift, even through my time from 2018 to 2024 now, as a creator, seeing that whole model shift and change and morph has certainly been very interesting to be a part of.
[00:34:53.786] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you have listed a number of your community links and you said that community is becoming much more of an important part of your job as a content creator. And so you have a discord, which a lot of folks have, but also Patreon and also the VR chat group that you say you've been in an early beta for being able to monetize. And so how do these types of patronage models start to fit into your overall revenue picture?
[00:35:17.065] TFMJonny: Yeah, so they're not the massive revenue generators. It's just that it's a way for fans to support the content. And I don't think that has changed at all. I think out of everything that has changed in the creator space, the one thing that has never changed that has stayed the same is the idea of crowdfunding. And I'm so happy that crowdfunding has just grown from, you know, I can remember 10, 15 years ago when Kickstarter was just starting out and Patreon was just starting out. And this whole idea of crowdfunding was still kind of new. And now we've seen it morph into this democratization of content. And I absolutely love it, you know, how people can not have to rely on traditional gatekeepers anymore. to get their content out there. And I'm proud to say, like, for example, our project with Ariel and Archangel Film for the Like Crazy music video was completely funded through crowdfunding because one of the secrets of the music industry is you don't really make any money off of music unless you're really, really big. And even then you don't really make that much money. So like crowdfunding has allowed us to create these projects and to fund these projects and that's really where i find its strengths and also allowing for that one-on-one with fans which is something to me at least as a creator that i've always held very sacred and special because i've been on the other side of that table you know i've i've met people who were my idols and talked to them and interacted with them and having a mechanism like creator economy or patreon which makes it easy for you to do meet and greets regularly with your fans and interact with your fans is more powerful than a paycheck, in my opinion. Like the money is great to keep my business running, but I don't do that for the money. I do it because, especially as a creator locked in my basement, just creating stuff, you know, all by myself, I don't really interact with my audience. And so using these mechanisms to interact with my fans on a personal level and taking it even a step further where we have VRChat where people can just put on a headset and I'm standing right in front of them and talking to them and looking at them directly like they didn't have to travel to a convention to do that and they can do it every week. It's an incredibly powerful thing and i don't want to be too over the top but like frankly it i've had people tell me that that sort of interaction and that sort of thing has changed their lives and given them a place where they feel like they have an identity and that's what's so powerful right now i think about community building in the independent creator space is we have all these little niche communities that give people an identity a place where they feel they belong that is so perfectly tailored to them And that to me sort of, you know, it's nice to talk about money, but at the end of the day, you know, for me as an artist, it's about having an impact on people's lives. That's, you know, that's my paycheck, if that makes sense.
[00:38:14.863] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And right now the instance caps for VRChat is around 80, but I know at Forality, they had like super large sizes.
[00:38:25.351] TFMJonny: 170 or 180 people, I think they crammed into an instance during Forality. Yeah.
[00:38:29.178] Kent Bye: Yeah. So they had some larger sizes. I heard up to maybe up to 200, but 170, 180, but how do you navigate the instance size? If you have basically a hard limit, you can have different time zones or like, how do you approach that?
[00:38:42.937] TFMJonny: Um, yeah, that that's a two pronged approach. The first one is every time I see Tupper, I annoy him with, so when are we getting larger lobbies? And he just rolls his eyes like, uh, soon we're working on it, Johnny. But other than that, I would highly recommend people check out projects like cease and desist fest, which is a huge music festival that happens. I believe twice a year now in VR chat. And, uh, also forality is another excellent example. We're heavily relying on multi-instancing. right now to do these events. And I mean, this isn't anything new. The multi-instancing performances is how Fortnite did their concerts as well in their metaverse concerts. And so essentially just taking that avatar and rebroadcasting it over multiple instances. And that has been an incredibly effective tool. We've had these tools in VRChat for quite a while now, whether it's motion shader, which is a shader that allows you to do that. or any of the many other technologies that are being utilized. I'm not sure what Forality uses. It may be Motion Shader, I'm not sure. But everything is there to do exactly like, for example, what they were doing in Fortnite for live performance and music. So I've never felt limited by the instance cap in vr chat i've never felt that limitation those problems have been solved would it be nice to walk out on stage and see 400 500 a thousand people in front of me yeah that'd be really cool but i don't think we'll have the technology for quite a long time to be able to do something like that and i think out of everything that's the one key thing that is missing unfortunately but it's not like we haven't solved that problem and certainly the younger generations from what i've seen it's not as much of a factor i don't think as it would have been for say the older generation that's used to going to a concert with 10 000 people in a stadium and and you know that that experience what i tend to find at least in the virtual space and i'll use forality as an example people love being able to just go into an instance with their friends and only their friends and go watch a performance and there i am standing on stage performing in front of you um it's an interesting experience especially as a performer doing virality there is no audience we we were essentially in what was a broadcasting studio in a virtual space. And there were maybe a couple of friends that were with me in the audience just watching us. But we didn't have any idea of how many people were out there. We would go to a break in the middle of the performance, and one of my staff would run up to me and be like, 1,200. 1200, you know, and you just have to kind of visualize in your head. Yeah, there's 1200 people standing in front of me right now. But you kind of have to do that in your head because you're just in a virtual studio. It's just the crew. It's just a couple of your friends and staff and you on stage. You know, it's a bizarre experience. But talking to people and seeing how they consumed that content, it was very common to hear people say, you know, I just went into an instance with my friends and I experienced the concert on a more personal level. with just the people that, you know, I want to be around. And, you know, you don't have that other person shouting in your ear that you don't know or that person nudging you from behind or kicking your chair or anything like that. It's a different flavor. And it's certainly something that I enjoy exploring as an artist because that sort of experience while it's not you know seeing a big musician in a 10 20 000 person stadium there is something special about being able to just sit there with your friends and talk openly and just be yourself and feel at home and then just have your favorite creator on stage there right in front of you it's something that is very unique to the virtual space and i definitely as a performer would love to keep exploring that because i think there is something special there
[00:42:36.423] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I'm going to be following up with Ariel to really dig into a lot of the technical aspects of producing the music video of Like Crazy. But I'd love to hear from your side, what kind of direction did you give to Ariel? And you said it was crowdfunded, so you had some resources to actually have a big team and put together this pretty substantive production. So yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit of that story.
[00:42:59.952] TFMJonny: Yeah, absolutely. So about, I'd say five-ish months ago, I approached Ariel because I was looking for a new director for a music video project. And I saw her project from the previous year, Ulterior Motives, which I highly recommend everybody go check out. It's amazing. Ariel is a phenomenal cinematographer, both IRL and in the virtual world. She definitely knows her stuff. She just has a way of capturing things through a lens that is just very uniquely her style. And so I saw Ulterior Motives and I was like, okay, this could work really, really well. This style could work really, really well for a music video. And so I reached out, we chatted for a little while, picked a song that, cause I had a number of songs that were in production. So we picked Like Crazy and we just kind of went for it. And we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into because it started off with just a crew of myself, ariel and lydian melody who's the guitarist on the project and it ballooned into a crew of i want to say almost two dozen two dozen people and we just kept pulling resources from anywhere we could because ariel kind of said well i want to have a space battle sequence something that has never been done in VR filmmaking. Let's have a space battle sequence and didn't really think of what the logistical nightmare that would turn into. And so at the end of the day, those sequences we got, we had to get a stunt coordinator to plan all of that out. We had to get, just like in any sort of IRL sequence, action filming similar to we equated it a lot to like Top Gun Maverick. You need multi cameras to capture sequences. So we that's what we did. We went out and we pulled in the top cinematographers in the VR space and just literally plopped them down on virtual asteroids in a space in a space world and we did all of our stuff and the footage we got was absolutely amazing and nobody had ever done that before but it did balloon into this massive monster of a project we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and i really hope when you get a chance to sit down with her she goes into detail about all of that, because to this date, it was probably one of the most ambitious projects I've ever worked on. And we quite literally defined a lot of stuff, especially in that space battle sequence, because nobody had really ever done that before. So we looked a lot to the IRL sort of things that they were doing with certain films, like I say, Top Gun Maverick and other similar flight films. And we just essentially translated a lot of what they did there into VR. But yeah, no one had ever done it before. And it was quite the undertaking. And thank goodness I already had a couple hundred hours of flight experience in VR, because I had to fly that spacecraft. And so did the stunt coordinator. And it was quite a quite a crazy thing to do. But yeah, it was it's a phenomenal project. And I highly recommend everybody go check it out. And just the end product is just so beautiful. Ariel did such an amazing job on it.
[00:46:08.786] Kent Bye: Yeah, and like I said, it's a pretty broad scope and really ambitious in terms of trying to tell a story that is like a science fiction future that has these two characters. And it's got a lot of stylized explorations of what you can do with the limits and bounds of filmmaking within VRChat from the different worlds and the avatar representations. And yeah, just a really massive project.
[00:46:31.896] TFMJonny: Yeah, and I think the biggest hurdle for VR filmmaking right now is making it not look like VRChat, which is kind of weird to say, but it's kind of true because VRChat does very much have sort of a video game aesthetic to it because it essentially is a video game and we are essentially doing a sort of high-end version of machinima in a sense but what ariel did with ulterior motives and with the like crazy project you know we were shooting in pro res in 4k so we would get the stuff out of vr chat and then ariel would immediately turn around and start making it not look like VRChat, which is huge. And there's only a handful of filmmakers, I think, in the VR filmmaking space that have achieved that to a varying extent. And we had a great discussion about it at Raindance at the Q&A when we showed the film about just how important that is and how that feels like is the next hurdle, is the next frontier. I don't think we're far off from it. I truthfully do not think we're that far off from it. If somebody came in like say a Netflix or something and dropped a million dollars on a project, could we make it look like VRChat never even touched it? Absolutely 100%. Literally, it just comes down to funding artists, you know, doing a traditional model of filmmaking, and having the budgets to do that, like we are literally at that point right now. And before you know, anybody says, Oh, well, can VR chat be used to produce a television show, or a movie? like an honest, commercially released, like big release. And I do believe 100%, like we are there. And the funnier part is we could do it for a fraction of the budget. And I've talked about this in great length, many places I've gone to give talks on what we do. People just can't believe it. Like I was at South by Southwest in 2023, talking about what we did with the music videos back then and everything. And people were just... They couldn't believe it. They're just like, you're doing what? And there is precedent for this. I remind people, if you look at the MMD community of 10 years ago, a franchise grew out of that as well, if anybody might remember RWBY. that grew out of that community and became a huge franchise and a huge juggernaut in the anime space. And it all just came from this little program. It started off in this little program that its creator was fiddling around with, and it grew into this huge thing. And I really do truly believe that we are on the cusp of something like that happening in VR filmmaking. It's literally the only thing missing is somebody willing to walk up to these artists and say, here's your budget. go, which is really exciting. Really, really exciting.
[00:49:25.235] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. I know Ariel has done a lot with color grading and did quite a deep dive last year at Braindance digging into her process of color grading. So definitely see that effect on this project as well. So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:49:45.993] TFMJonny: yeah it's going to sound a little cliche but i do believe the sky's the limit i mean you can create anything in the virtual space and a large portion of my job is just exploring what that can be whether it's interacting with fans on a more personal level or doing musical gigs and music festivals and raising money for charity and Just building a community around that and redefining what a music artist can be or what an actor can be or anything like that. That's where I really think it's going. It's just I really think the VR space at this moment is still just this massively experimental space. And we are just getting started. And so I don't really have a specific trajectory that I think it's going because I really do think that it's just really in this amazing artistic experimental space. And there's just going to be so much that comes from it. And it's just now that we're starting to see corporate money starting to make its way into the space and seeing what we can do with that, because the reality is the only thing truly I believe the only thing holding us back at this moment is is funding that that that is it period the people are there the potential money is there the business models are there so we're just experimenting to see what people want is essentially what we're doing now right and uh is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community I just want to thank the entire immersive community for giving me a home. I'm just this Canadian dude up in Northern Canada who doesn't live in LA, who doesn't live in New York, who found a place, who found a canvas to paint on that people took interest in. And I will forever be grateful for the immersive community, for the XR community, for giving me that opportunity to share my art and my viewpoint with the world. Like I just can't even put that into words. I'm just so incredibly grateful for the career that it gave me.
[00:51:49.238] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, TFM, Johnny, thanks so much for joining me today. And I highly recommend folks go check out Like Crazy and a lot of your work that you've been doing on these different platforms, especially a lot of the long form content that you've been doing on YouTube and some of your shorts that you've been doing on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and also YouTube. And yeah, just all your music and contributions to not only performing and doing that in VRChat, but also helping to start some of the very early scenes of live performance within VRChat. And so... Just really glad to have the opportunity to help break down a little bit more about your journey into the space and your latest project. Thanks again for joining me. Thank you so much. That was TFM Johnny. He's a YouTuber, TikTok creator, streamer, and now a VTuber who uses virtual reality and VRChat as part of his platform of content creation. I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. First of all, just super fascinating to hear a little bit more about the history of live performance within the context of VRChat. TFM Johnny has been Certainly on the leading edge of performing and singing within the context of VRChat. And there's certainly been a lot of changes and evolution in the platform. And the groups are certainly a huge shift in terms of gathering these different types of live events and performances that are happening. I think Raindance is a really great festival to curate and highlight some of this production of virtual culture that's happening within the context of VRChat. So super appreciative of the Raindance community to highlight some of that. And so the music video that TFM Johnny did with Ariel Emerald, like crazy, I'll be digging into much more detail into the specifics of that video in my following conversation that I'll have with Ariel Emerald to really do a deep dive with her about both her process of filmmaking, but also a little bit more about the story and mechanics of how that piece came together. And there's also a Q&A that I highly recommend folks check out where they go into a lot of the mechanics and the process of actually creating some of these scenes that he was talking about. and you know a big theme in this conversation also was tfm johnny says that one of the biggest jobs for a content creator these days is that you're actually a community builder and that he's been an early adopter for groups within the context of vr chat and you know he's got a discord and a patreon and youtube subscribers twitch subscribers you know all these other different platforms where he's able to gather his community but within the context of vr chat just to have a group that's monetized and have these different private instances and kind of like these meet and greets that you see happening at festivals like twitchcon and other places where folks can connect to content creators so i feel like tfm johnny is actually a really great example of someone where the creator economy actually has a really clear use case for someone who's already got an audience on other platforms over a million youtube subscribers and you know a million followers on TikTok and sizable enough of a base for his social media platforms where he can start to leverage and connect more privately on these one-on-one contexts with his community. And so he's been focusing on that a lot as he continues to explore what's next after he's taken a little bit of a hiatus of his YouTube content. And also TFM Johnny was talking about this changing landscape of how the majority of his income would be coming from ad revenue from YouTube. But now with the shift with more and more shorts that are happening in the media ecosystem from like TikTok and Instagram reels, as well as with YouTube shorts, that all of these short form videos aren't necessarily as monetized as the long form content that he has. He mentioned that hustle as a full-time content creator to find all the different revenue streams. And as a content creator myself, there's certainly a lot of things that I also am in the same sort of searching and wondering and also in the process of figuring out definitely some good ideas that are being shared here in terms of just gathering the community and other ways to really bring the community together. So the next conversation I have with Ariel Emerald starts to get into a lot of different dimensions of social anxiety. And I think I suffer from a lot of just fundamental social anxiety, especially in, you know, it's kind of odd because I have a podcast and I go to these conferences and I have these really deep, intimate one-on-one conversations. And, you know, I go to these different events in VRChat and then have these really in-depth deep dives into people's story. But I think there's a sort of fundamental uncomfortableness that I have in social situations that I find that My identity and my podcast serves as a way for me to have those types of connections that I'm really searching for. So certainly if you've been a longtime listener to the podcast, then there's something around those types of deep dive conversations that you're resonating with. And as I was listening to TFM Johnny, really reflecting on what would it mean to have more of an intentional gathering of my listeners, my audience, my supporters on Patreon who have been indispensable for me to continue to even be doing this kind of like, wild project of doing over 10 years now of oral history conversations with folks from the VR industry. So I think this series on Raindance is providing me the opportunity to cover some of the different aspects of the VR industry that I have long neglected. I think a lot of the broader press and the industry hasn't really been paying attention to the cultural dynamics that are happening within these social VR platforms. It tends to be very app based like oh there's a new application here's the application here's the game but there's a lot of cultural aspects that are happening on vr that's kind of like the magic of vr i really think of what what the early adopters and the people who are really finding true value of virtual reality's medium they're on these social vr platforms like vr chat and so it's just been really enlightening to do a little bit more of a deep dive to dig into it with my coverage of the voices of vr i've been super fascinated with what's been happening with arts and storytelling and more of the creative expression that I find at these different film festivals, but there's certainly a lot of that that's just happening organically within the context of VRChat. So Raindance is a great opportunity for me to do this type of event-based coverage where I'm covering these events, covering these different artifacts. Like you can go watch TFM Johnny's Like Crazy music video, but there's all these other aspects of TFM Johnny's life and his relationship to virtual reality as a medium that I think is just super rich as a concept and an idea. And I think everybody from content creators and world builders with the layoffs of VRChat, there's this moment in the industry right now where everybody is just sort of wondering, like, how is this going to be like a super sustainable business for folks, not only for VRChat to survive, but also for individual content creators? DFM Johnny is somebody who is well positioned in a way that has well diversified forms of content that's put across all these different content channels. And I think for someone who is just using virtual reality as a medium, then how does the creator economy work for a world builder or someone else who's creating a game or a one-off experience? And I think it's those different types of use cases for the everyday user of how the creator economy is actually going to work. sort of gets to the heart of how we're going to have this paradigm shift into something that's completely different than what we've had from before, whether that's through advertising based models, surveillance, capitalism, all these different things. Like I feel like VRChat is doing something completely new and different and it's a paradigm shift, but they themselves haven't fully figured it out. So there's something around like TFM Johnny's story that is capturing maybe some of the early glimmers of For some people that makes sense for already have these big audiences that they're able to connect to, but also maybe even in a small micro level, you know, what does it mean for people to be connected and find the people that they really resonate and to find their community and to find their identity and to express their identity in a way? So these are all like deep questions that are in the broader XR industry, but also ones that I'm deeply meditating on as well. I don't have any answers. I'm still sort of investigating it all for myself. But I just really appreciated the opportunity to speak with TFM Johnny. And I think as I dig into my next conversation with Ariel Emerald, we'll be unpacking a lot more of those aspects of overcoming different aspects of social anxiety, but also, you know, what's happening in the broader filmmaking scene within the context of VR. Well, I think I'm going to end it there and just say thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I really appreciate all the support that people have been giving me over the years through Patreon. And if you feel inspired in any way, just as a side note, because of all the social anxiety that I think I feel. There's a lot of things that have been left unaddressed or things that I need to kind of update and even look at with my Patreon and to do a little bit of a reset and to say, okay, here's my intention and here's the invitation. So I haven't necessarily articulated that yet, but I guess this is just like an unfolding process as I still kind of like figure it all out as TFM Johnny is also in the process of figuring stuff out in this new changing landscape on so many different levels. Lots of stuff that's happening in the world, as I'm sure everybody is well aware of. So, yeah. Anyway, I just want to thank you again for listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and do consider becoming a member of the Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
