[STYLE-747] Event guidelines

MusicBrainz Style
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the proposed ticket says

For concerts, the title format should be “[Headlining act] at [Venue].” The headlining act is the artist whose name appears first on the bill. If the concert is a co-headlining concert (i.e. 2 or more artists share the top spot), the format should be “[Headliner 1] and [Headliner 2] at [Venue].” The only exceptions to this is if the concert has a special name, e.g. “Alice Cooper’s Christmas Pudding 2010,” or if the concert is part of the entertainment at a non-music event, e.g. KISS at Illinois State Fair.

i disagree with this. if a tour is called “spring tour 1987” then yes, it should use this format. however, many tours, especially modern tours, have a specific theme. for example, reputation Stadium Tour. i’ve been adding these as “[tour name]: [city name]”. i mean… there are signs all over the venue that say “reputation stadium tour,” i can’t imagine it as anything else. my understanding of the current guideline is that the tour name should be the title, because this is an official title for the event.

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The best for me however would be optional event title and automatic title when left empty:

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Ok, so I have put together my first proposed draft for basic event guidelines, mostly based on @HibiscusKazeneko’s proposals with some of the feedback from this thread. Please discuss and let’s improve them and make them official:

https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:Reosarevok/Style/Event

One part I really don’t know what to do with; I have three different alternatives for a date guideline:

  • For events that happen on one day but are planned to finish after midnight, enter the following day as the end date.

  • For events that happen on one day but where at least one artist is planned to start performing after midnight, enter the following day as the end date.

  • For events that happen on one day, enter the same day as the end date, even if the event finishes after midnight.

I feel all three will confuse people in some way or another.

The first is the most “proper”, but it might be unintuitive to see many one-day events have a two-day event date.

The third is the most similar to the way people actually talk about concerts that go on past midnight, but it does mean someone reading the data literally (or even more, a computer) will struggle to understand that some concerts technically happened the next day, not the previous morning, if an artist time such as 00:30 is given.

The second limits the confusion to cases where otherwise we’d have this confusion, but the inconsistency seems to add its own sources of confusion.

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What my first draft does not look into: non-festival multi-day events such as fairs and conventions, for which suggestions were made but where I don’t know enough to have an opinion plus they’re a lot more niche so not as horribly overdue some guidelines. That said, if everyone seems to agree with a particular approach to those, we can certainly add it as well.

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I would prefer this option. This is how the date is usually stated in the program. Even at a multi-day event, it is usually not even recorded whether the last performance took place before or after midnight. Day x is when it began and the entire festival ends on the date when the last day began.

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Time

When available, use the official, advertised start time for the event as a whole (commonly “door time”).

This seems strange to me. I can only recall events of the following 2 varieties:

  1. Start Time and Doors Open are advertised side-by-side.
  2. Start Time is advertised, doors open is not.

I have not been adding events based on the time doors open. And why stop at doors open? Part of the “event as a whole” is lining up for the doors.

The events I can think of that end after midnight are advertised/marketed as ending the next day.

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Thank you for creating the draft.

Regarding start date:

For me, this is the option to go. Even multi-day festivals like Wacken have the end date on the last day where artists perform. And the day ends when the last artist finishes, even if it is 4am on the next day.

Further thoughts on this topic copied from my comment on STYLE-747:

  1. Artists performing past midnight: I think even if the stating time is 00:30 on sunday, the Artist relation should be related to the day event of saturday. Given that there is a break after the last performing artist of saturday and the first one on sunday. For Example Bloodbath being the the last performer on day 5 and Angus McSix being the first performer on day 6 at Wacken Open Air 2023.
    For events which have music literally around the clock for multiple days without break I suggest to cut a hard line at midnight (starting time)
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I think I prefer this option unless a similar event (one that happens just over midnight) is advertised as a multi-day event. I actually haven’t seen any such events myself, but have seen several that aren’t advertised as multi-day events. one example is Coltchella (poster available here), a two-day event with artists performing after midnight (also part of a convention). each day is marketed as Friday and Saturday (I entered the events using one of the other alternatives you mentioned tho, because I’d read it somewhere)

I do think this should be an exception mentioned too, if we go with alternative 3

I think having a checkbox or drop-down to note what time is used might solve this issue, especially for events where the door time isn’t advertised…or we could simply leave the time field blank if the door time isn’t known, and rely on the start time fields for artists

one issue I’ve come across in my event editing which I think would be good to add in the guidelines, time formats in the time fields (24-hour time vs 12-hour time). I believe I saw somewhere that the event start time should be 24-hour time, but I’ve seen no guidance for the artist start times, whether those should do the same or not. I think it might make sense to store times as 24-hour time, but as an American, I have a hard time converting to 24-hour time. perhaps this is more an issue with the site design, which should be a seperate discussion, but I wanted to bring it up for potential guidelining too

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I wonder why you do not mention Series.
I think we should organize annual Festivals like Wacken in a Series.
Same for a tour. Example: April Art Change Tour

Further questions on Series copied from my comment on STYLE-747:

  1. Should general social media and other URLs, which are not related to a year/event be included in each event of the series or only in the series?
  2. Should the Series have a held at relation? Maybe add begin and end date for Festivals changing its place sometime?. Maybe related: Add a place relationship for series of events
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Regarding Time also from STYLE-747:

  1. Time field in the Artist-Event relation. The style guide provides Local time a band’s performance is scheduled to start, formatted HH:MM. But i saw some relations with start and end time HH:MM-HH:MM or HH:MM - HH:MM. I think the end time is also useful information and should be allowed.
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Exciting!!

Definitely this one. I remember wondering about this back when I started adding events, but adding 1 day events that run late (e.g. most of the ones I attend) as 2 day events feels and looks very unnatural. I’ve been entering them as 1 day events for years and it’s been feeling good - a little bit weird when you enter a band as 00:30, but not as weird as the alternative.

For most of the events I go to ‘doors open’ is the only time given, so that’s what I’ve been entering, because that way I can be consistent. But I imagine customs would vary depending on genre and region?

As mentioned in the guideline, if what you’re referring to as start time = first artist starting to perform, I feel like we already have that with the artist relationship time field.

tl;dr I quite like that part of the draft guidelines tbh, concise and makes it clear that ‘door time’ is only one interpretation of a starting time.

Got one for you here.

On that note, I have taken a lot of titles straight from Facebook events (I don’t want to waste time standardising anything until there’s guidelines), and [tour name, city] has been much more common than [tour name: city]. So I have been using commas a lot, including in the many venue example above. Just pointing it out, happy to change to colons.

These examples seem to just skirt around the most common event type that I enter (that isn’t a obvious name) - which is often “[artist/s]: [tour]: [location]”. Example.

Perhaps we could add an event like that to the examples. Or I should be removing the artist name from those events, which is fine also (as said, most of them are FB event names).

It all looks really good! I do have trouble following the long paragraphs though. I like the format in the broadcast guidelines where there’s ‘note’ bulletpoints followed by ‘example’ bullet points, breaking things up. And where the example formats are consistently and clearly laid out, e.g. “follow this format: YYYY-MM-DD: [Collective/Label Name,] Radio Station Name…”

I’m happy to draft some changes if you’d like @reosarevok, let me know! Otherwise no stress :ok_hand:

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This never crossed my mind since I thought HH:MM immediately clarifies 24-hour time, but I think it partially is because I have never considered 12-hour time a valid alternative for anything official :sweat_smile: Probably an European thing, I understand now. It’s a fair point that it wasn’t too clearly specified, I added “All times should be entered in 24-hour notation (19:00, not 7:00 PM).” to the guideline now.

I trust your math ability enough for adding 12 to anything that says PM :slight_smile: That said, I’m sure a paste-a-time userscript that converts it for you wouldn’t be hard to write.

These are all correct, it’s just I haven’t noticed anyone having issues with this that would require it being spelled out in a guideline :slight_smile: Guidelines are mostly useful when there’s something that needs deciding (for example, if we have a question about how specifically the series should and should not be used) - if people feel there’s any points for this that could use debating, do bring it up!

From your other post, both start and end times for artists can make sense but I would not put them in the same attribute, personally - I feel if we want them we should have a separate “end time” field. But I’m open to discussing that. My main worry is that allowing for end time to optionally be appended to start time just means people will enter the times in several different ways and it will be extra confusing :slight_smile:

When the tour barely has a real name, like this one, I’d probably just use the “Artists at Venue” option myself, but if people disagree we can look into it. Honestly, the main thing with these names is “we need one because we need one, so use something that makes sense” - the guideline is more meant as an attempt to help people find something that makes sense, in this case, than a hardcore “YOU MUST DO THIS”.

I am known to long-paragraph a bit much, so if you want to try to make it all flow more nicely, I’m happy with that.

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For what it’s worth, “time is doors time” is the only part of this guideline proposal that is actually already a guideline :slight_smile:

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I agree, it shouldn’t say it must be a certain way, but if you are uncertain of what to do it can be reassuring to have a suggested format spelled out : )

Anyway, I drafted some changes on my wiki page (I didn’t realise you could have Wiki user sub-pages, cool!), so you can compare and see if you prefer any of the changes: User:Aerozol/event - MusicBrainz Wiki

That might have been a bad example, here’s some more: 1, 2, 3, 4

Probably a side-effect of it being useful for promoters to cram everything (e.g. band, tour, location) into the title, to help with search results. But still, it means that’s the format people might be used to.

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So for events where doors open time is not advertised, do we leave time blank? Seems consistent with people leaving release countries blank to indicate “hundreds of countries” instead of “zero countries”.

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It says “When available” :slight_smile: If all you have is the first performer, just use that.

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so the event time field will sometimes be the door time and sometimes the start time? (depending on what data we have?) the current wording seems a bit too vague to determine whether or not to do this or leave it blank

I personally think it might be better to keep it as the door time and rely on the artist relationships for start time, but I’m fine with either solution~

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Well, if no door time is given, then all we can assume is that the event starts at the time the first band starts (a lot of small shows I’ve been to have no such thing as a “door time”, it’s just “the time of the show when the show starts”)

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This issue is a choice between people and machines, and it’s really not an easy one to make because both are really important. Take this timetable as an example. All of it is being sold as happening on January 8, though technically almost half of the acts happen on January 9. Presenting events like this is common practice, at least where I live, and it would appear wrong to me to list ‘day one’ as happening on two separate days. On the other hand, I’ve often hoped that one day we get to the point where MB (or an external tool) could automatically generate timetables in different styles, based on the event-data available in MB. If we pick the human option quoted above we through away all those kinds of options.

What if we don’t choose… Perhaps we could have a ‘credited as’-date as well as an actual date? So in the example listed above the actual date for Day 1 would be January 8 AND 9, where as the credited date would January 8.

We should also take into consideration that to make it really machine-readable, we need to be able to link performers to dates. If we decide that Day 1 happens on 2 days we need to be able to link the performers to a date. Right now, we can only attach times to the performers, so will it be clear for a machine that a performer at 01:00 played on January 9 instead of January 8?

Here are two other problems with events I’ve come across. I’m not sure if this is the place to share these, so please excuse me if it’s not.

  • Artists playing a set together can’t be added as one entry. Example: The event in MB and the corresponding timetable. If you look at the act ‘Terry Toner & Herr Arter’ you can see they played together. But in MB I have to add them separately. I think it would be better if I could add them like ‘Terry Toner & Herr Arter’ in one entry.

  • Performers aren’t being ordered based on time, nor can we order them manually. Using this example again we can see all times have been entered but I can’t find any logic in the order in which they are displayed.

If these two issues were solved event pages would give a far more intuitive overview of what an event looks like.

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