The club is jam-packed with eager fans dancing with their hands up, but before you can join them you have a job to do. You must get Deadmau5, the electronic music producer and performer, safely to the stage. With help from a digital avatar of Deadmau5’s cat, Meowingtons, you have to maneuver over and around sound equipment and security guards as selfie-seeking fans begin to swarm. When you finally deliver him in one piece, you’re awash in the sounds of his latest track, “Saved.” You look up, down, left, right, and you are standing in the middle of a concert. The crowd comes alive, dancing to the pulsing music.

This is what it’s like playing Deadmau5, an interactive virtual reality game. The project, a mix of game-engine graphics and 360-degree video, is a collaboration between Deadmau5 and Absolut Labs, the liquor brand’s idea incubator. The game is to be released on Wednesday. It’s one of a number of virtual reality projects in the music industry, which wants to stake its claim in a growing form of entertainment that could become an avenue to additional revenue and a new approach for musicians in connecting with fans. But until the public fully embraces virtual reality, partnerships with brands like Absolut have become a path to helping finance projects and put headsets in the hands of viewers.

“It was a good way to get our feet wet,” said Deadmau5, who added that he was already working on a bigger virtual reality project. “This is opening the door to serious stuff.” An avid gamer, he was actively involved in the demo, even donning a motion-capture suit to record his movements running, jumping and dancing.

Other acts like Duran Duran, U2, the Weeknd and Jack White have produced 360-degree videos. “Reminder,” a sci-fi fantasy by the electronic group Moderat, recently made its debut on NYT VR, The New York Times’s virtual reality app.