I’m currently working on adding the Mutants of the Monsters 2020 festival as an event. Because of the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, they ended up being able to coordinate the festival to be entirely virtual with the bands performing live on YouTube from their own separate locations (mainly their homes, I think).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to enter the location of such an event? I imagine these are/will be more and more popular. Do we need “Internet”, “Virtual”, or even “YouTube” added as locations?
I started from this website as a source if anyone wants to look:
We might need a [virtual] or [online] special purpose area or place for cases like these.
Only a handful of editors can add Areas, so it would require a ticket.
This is complex. It is an “online broadcast event”, like a radio show, but the locations will be different for each band.
Normally you have two or three different stages but with these Online events each band has their own stage which will be in different countries. It would be an interesting fact to add where possible. Including if the band’s performance is live or recorded.
Often times those performers will be broadcasting from their homes or private rehearsal spaces. For semi-obvious reasons, we shouldn’t be adding artists’ homes as Places.
That and it doesn’t really reflect the fact that it was essentially a worldwide event. The recordings of the festival could have areas though, possibly the states that the bands live in. This event would’ve physically been held in Little Rock, Arkansas, but there were performers from out of state.
Responding a little less glibly – while I don’t have information on hand, I suspect there’s been instances of “concerts” where an audience gathers in a room for a performance by an animated/animatronic/robotic “band”, where the actual human music-makers are in a different location. Maybe Gorillaz/Kraftwerk/chuck-e-cheeze. I don’t really think of “location” as the location of the musicians.
Also… it’s not safe to assume that the performers are actually “recorded” per se, even in an online/streaming arrangement.
What interests me for any recordings is where and when it was recorded (live or not), even if it’s a different place for voice than for drums, for bass, for guitar…
It’s like for the recordings on CD.
It is not really relevant to talk about where is the audience, IMO.
No event is “on YouTube”. It does not make sense in physical terms. That is the method of broadcast. It is more of a Medium. A Company who is then hosting the broadcast. Just like Spotify or iTunes. They are the companies who host, not locations in themselves.
“On YouTube” and “On Spotify” is more like “On ABC TV” or “On BBC Radio One”.
The Host of the event is a human sitting in a location. In this example - Arkansas, USA.
The performances happen in other locations. This can be as vague as “USA” as they don’t need to give out their home address. But they are still sitting somewhere doing the broadcast. Naming the City or State of the performer is more interesting and relevant than knowing which commercial station we could listen to it on. “On YouTube” is like saying Glastonbury is “On BBC TV”.
This is interesting when is spread worldwide. (@jesus2099 understands what I mean).
And correct, none of this is needed. Not a single physical location needs to be added. But events are still run from somewhere. And that somewhere is not “in YouTube”. Even if it was Google’s AI running the event that AI is on a server somewhere being initiated by someone.
Youtube \ Spotify \ iTunes are not locations. They are companies who pay for these events and make the profit from them through advertising.
In this example, the “Mutants of the Monsters 2020” festivals is normally run from Arkansa in the USA.
The first thing I find in a search still ties them clearly to Arkansas. Mutants of the Monster , a Central Arkansas festival helmed by Chris Terry (Rwake, Deadbird, Iron Tongue) that has championed heavy sounds for years, is going virtual in 2020 . We are also raising funds and awareness for two local organizations that support transgender rights and immigrants here in Arkansas.
It is run on the Arkansas Times’ You Tube channel. To me that still makes it an Arkansas gig. Arkansas is clearly at the centre of it all.
I’m not talking about a specific platform. I just wanted to point out that it’s technologically possible to stream audio and video live without recording it. The same way that live television can be broadcasted without recording it (and frequently was, in the 1950s and earlier).
I think some people may be conflating the location of an event with the location of the associated recordings (if there are any).
I do not think they need/should have the same rules.
I agree that the location associated with the recording should be the physical location of the musician.
However, I feel that the location of an event is where people go to experience it. In that respect, it would make sense to say that an event location was “youtube”, but the associated recordings have locations of “Joe Guitarist’s house in Springfield”. (and we can do this with the current Musicbrainz database schema)
Oh, yeah, and I feel this is more significant to people who use Musicbrainz for upcoming events. For an upcoming (future) event, “location” is often interpreted as “if you’re interested in this event, here’s what you will have to do to attend”
No… I mean a live transmission may not necessarily be recorded (in any practical sense). If you think of video-chat software like Zoom or FaceTime, you wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be recordings of the sessions that you could view later. (Or would you? I don’t know those specific apps in much detail.)
Of course, all that changes if you factor in the NSA.
Agreed, anything else is getting into some technical weeds.
I don’t say “hey this event is taking place at 43 Wingrove Avenue, Wellington!” (the artist’s house)
I say “there’s this event you can watch/‘atttend’ on Youtube”
