i think there’s a difference between a live recording session and a live album. destinction might get nebulous in times of live streaming though.
if we follow your definition, we can label nearly every jazz album since the 1960’s with “live” because there mostly are no overdubs.
Not too excited about handling of metadata on Rateyourmusic but they are differentiating it:
I know of one album that’s got “recorded live in a secret location” on it, but the bass-player’s name is an anagram of the guitarist, so everyone’s sure it wasn’t live at all…
And all instruments and vocals must be recorded simultaneously too, to obtain the live session badge. 
I agree with this as the key criteria. The presence of an audience is confusing and I think should be ignored: How many people must be in the same physical room as the musicians? I have a number of live radio broadcasts where the ‘audience’ was probably less than 10 including engineers and the radio presenter
If it’s a live radio broadcast from a studio then yes it does
And there were live shows even without audience at the location (especially during the pandemic), but you can’t exclude everything that has been overdubbed in the studio.
I mostly go by how the album is presented. If it’s called a live recording, it is. Completely independent of the location of the recording. For edge cases, I decide what I think fits best.
I don’t understand how these can considered to be live. What is the difference between this and a ‘normal’ recording?
Overdubbing is common. If you look at some of the official Pink Floyd live albums you realise the tracks are not only full of overdubs, but also made up from multiple different concerts. Very much the work of a studio.
I was working on a Cure album yesterday that was a video of a concert recorded on one night. They then came back the next day to record various close-ups. Which means a studio edit of the “real” live concert.
This is not unusual. Most live albums get a clean up in the studio before being pressed to CD. But most of the source material is live in front of an audience.
It is the thought that went into the album - these are presented as intended - live.
Meanwhile the KLF referred to many of their tracks as “Live from Trancentral”. Which is their basement studio and normally meant they just did the track in a single take. I would not mark those as “live” recordings.
Yes, same for the ‘live’ tracks on simon and garfunkel’s greatest hits…crossfaded between tracks and some mixing…
The issue is do we want to distinguish between truely live recordings such as live bootlegs and live radio/streaming broadcasts vs studio dubbed stuff. It seems sensible to enable people to sonif they want.
I dont want people saying that my cds of
live radio broadcasts arent live because they didn’t have an audience.
there’s also releases recorded live at virtual events (i.e. in VR, or in this case, in Minecraft) like this one
back on the original topic, I could see a use for a seperator between the two types (live and live session), whether that’s a new secondary type or a release group attribute (once we have those, but probably better to have the former)
That would probably end up in a big mess because nobody would manage to use it correctly.
that seems to me like a killer argument or opinion that has the intent to change nothing and cannot be verified or falsified.
do you have comparable cases?
i support this. that is the key to this discussion i think.
also i draw back my statement on overdubs and live.
It’s more: If I imagine myself as an inexperienced editor, I would have huge troubles choosing between these attributes correctly. And very often you won’t be able to find out whether it was really live or almost re-recorded in the studio.
It would not help in this case: Better Late Than Never (not a word about “live” on the CD / DVD with the same recordings and mixed in applause plus live video footage is “live” - it was actually almost re-recorded)
In our case where “live” is certainly not to be taken literally, I am of course also for “not live”
a comparable case might be the distinction between karaoke and instrumental* in regards to work-recording relationships. from what I’ve seen, the differences are pretty easy to teach (in my mind) and fairly easy to remember, and we’re slowly but surely cleaning up all the old recordings marked as “instrumental”, as that’s all we used to have.
*for those not familiar, karaoke doesn’t include the lyrics or the vocal melody, leaving space for you to sing along, whereas instrumental doesn’t include lyrics but does include the vocal melody. lyrics are important to a karaoke recording, and less so for an instrumental
also, we might look at how well RYM uses these same subtypes in their database (I haven’t looked yet myself, admittedly)
Just to throw further confusion in here, where do we stand on Peel sessions? I haven’t investigated this in detail yet, but I’ve been doing a bit of work on Richard & Linda Thompson recordings so it’s come up a lot. For background:
“Sessions were usually four tracks recorded and mixed in a single day; as such they often had a rough-and-ready, demo-like feel, somewhere between a live performance and a finished recording.”
Reading that back now it sounds like these should definitely not be labeled as “live”, but I’m willing to bet there’s confusion in the DB at the moment. Some examples:
Release “Peel Sessions” by Smashing Pumpkins - MusicBrainz (album “live”, recordings not)
https://musicbrainz.org/release/feb1ddbc-0fc4-4cee-b0d9-090849c3a5b8 (album “live”, two Peel recordings “live”, two not)
etc.
That last link shows just how difficult it can be to give an answer to the “studio session” question in general… it includes some tracks from KEXP. By contrast with Peel, KEXP sets are typically live in-studio performances, often open to the public and/or live-streamed.
There are old discussions and agreement on this. Treated as live. They performed live in studio, often a mini-set of three or four tracks, and then broadcast a few days later to the wider audience.
A handy resource: BBC - Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - Artists A-Z
A linky you’ll like: BBC - Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - Richard And Linda Thompson
I edit a lot of these for many artists. The handy thing of that official BBC resource is they usually have the line-up and actual dates of recording. As well as the location.
To me, this (again) is the critical factor.
the size of the audience is irrelevant - either in studio or at the other end of the transmission medium (radio, streaming etc)
ideally live is without overdubs, but again, i’d ignore that.
Let’s think about a bootleg live recording as the ultimate live recording, not a ‘live’ recording that was messed with by the record company and broadcast later…
Without arguing in circles (I’m OK with the consensus and have been following it), the reason I brought up Peel sessions was not the presence or absence of an audience, but:
“Sessions were usually four tracks recorded and mixed in a single day”
Note single day, not single take; multiple tracks are laid down over the course of a day and then mixed for broadcast, as opposed to a single session being recorded as-performed for later transmission.
Here’s another fun one:
recorded “live” in studio, with audience noise dubbed in from an entirely different show/performer (John Martyn iirc). I’d initially removed the live designation from that one, but have since added it back based on this thread.
That still generally means the band performed together at the same time just like they do live. If the engineers then tweaked it a bit this is still likely less than the average Pink Floyd “live” CD. 
Otherwise the only true “Live” would be the bootleggers.
I think the challenge is that if the record company or radio station has taken a true live recording and messed with it and then calls it a live recording, we have to accept it as live. It’s just a different kind of live compared to bootlegs.
