Kacey Musgraves puts Meta Quest viewers inside a Texas honky-tonk

Why it matters

Meta is testing whether artist-controlled exclusives can lift Quest usage while lower headset sales and a $4.619B quarterly Reality Labs loss keep the pressure on.

Kacey Musgraves (@KaceyMusgraves) released a made-for-VR concert on Meta Quest on September 3rd, turning a performance at Billy Bob's Texas into a tour through the Fort Worth honky-tonk that puts headset viewers onstage, inside a guitar circle and beside the rodeo.

Kacey Musgraves Middle of Nowhere: An Immersive Experience draws from the Texas singer-songwriter's album of the same name, released on May 1st, and earlier songs. Meta's announcement says Musgraves shaped the production's creative direction from beginning to end rather than handing a conventional concert recording to a VR crew after the fact.

That distinction fits Musgraves, who grew up in Golden, Texas, and released music independently before her 2013 major-label debut, Same Trailer Different Park. The Recording Academy credits her with eight Grammy wins, including album of the year for Golden Hour. Returning to Texas for the Quest production gives the virtual setting a direct connection to the artist instead of a generic virtual venue.

A concert designed around the headset

The September 3rd announcement describes the concert as a stereoscopic 3D VR180 production filmed with Blackmagic URSA cameras. Untold Studios produced and creatively directed the project, with MediaMonks Inc. and 7 Cinematics as co-producers.

The creative team designed the staging, choreography, lighting and camera positions around where a viewer's head would appear inside each scene. Musgraves moves through Billy Bob's rather than remaining on a conventional stage. Meta says the experience pairs those changing positions with spatial audio and a music-video-style narrative.

The format gives Musgraves control over a part of a concert that artists rarely get to direct: the precise place from which each fan watches. A ticketed venue sells a finite set of sightlines, while VR180 lets the production place every viewer beside the performer without blocking an aisle or removing a barricade. The tradeoff is that the director still chooses each camera position; viewers receive intimacy rather than the freedom to walk anywhere in a fully rendered venue.

Meta calls the release exclusive to Quest. That exclusivity turns Musgraves' creative direction into part of Meta's hardware pitch, with access to the performance tied to putting on one of its headsets.

Untold's founders built for projects that cross formats

The production is also a useful expression of Untold Studios' founding model. Darren O'Kelly, Michael Wolfson, David Fleet and Rochelle Palmer founded Untold in 2018 as an independent studio spanning music, advertising and original content.

O'Kelly, who previously spent about 15 years at visual effects studio The Mill, described the idea as a "creative studio and community" that would avoid being boxed into one production category. Untold grew from six people to 170 during its first three years, according to O'Kelly and Palmer. A more recent profile of O'Kelly describes Untold as a global team of more than 500 artists, producers and technologists.

That structure suits an immersive concert, which combines live production, stereoscopic capture, post-production, sound and product design. Untold could treat the headset's field of view as part of the show instead of delivering footage to a separate technology vendor at the end of the process.

Meta's announcement uses the MediaMonks Inc. name, although the S4 Capital-owned agency rebranded its operating business as Monks. The third production partner, North Carolina-based 7 Cinematics, specializes in concert filming and lists Adam Paul as director, showrunner and executive producer, Adrian West as executive producer and Ben Walter as director of photography.

Every Quest exclusive has a job to do

Meta already offers music experiences featuring Coldplay, Sabrina Carpenter and BLACKPINK. The Musgraves production moves further toward artist-led programming created specifically for immersive video rather than adding songs to an established game.

The timing lands alongside a broader effort to make Quest useful between major game releases. Exclusive concerts address that usage problem from the content side: they provide a reason to retrieve the hardware for a particular artist or release.

Meta's latest financial filing shows the scale of that assignment. Reality Labs recorded a $4.619 billion operating loss in the second quarter, while Quest sales declined. Meta expects its full-year 2026 Reality Labs operating loss to remain similar to the 2025 result.

Apple has pursued a similar content strategy for Vision Pro. Its Metallica immersive concert launched in March 2025 with 180-degree video, spatial audio and camera positions close to the band. Both platforms are using access that a physical ticket cannot provide to establish a reason for immersive headsets to exist beyond games and workplace demos.

Musgraves gives Meta a particularly coherent version of that pitch. The production connects a Texas-born artist, a Texas album and a Texas venue, then uses VR to let her decide where the audience stands. Meta still has to prove that individual exclusives translate into sustained Quest use. For Musgraves and Untold, the release demonstrates how artist direction can extend into the viewer's position itself, making the headset part of the production rather than another screen for playing it back.