Community

One of the most corrosive concepts in the Second Life music scene is the concept of the Second life Music community.

I’m well aware of the warm fuzzy feeling the word Community instills, but the simple fact is “community think” is never as all-inclusive as it seems. We always want people that think as we do in the community, so any attempt to create a wonderful all inclusive community involves a good deal of politics.

Community = Good feeling

Politics = Bad feeling

Once you attempt an all-inclusive community conceptually, you have to birth it into existence by including people. Every idea works until you get people involved.

Once you add people to the mix, suddenly the desire for establishing orthodoxy appears. Once the orthodoxy is established, heretics can be singled out and dealt with appropriately.

This is a totally normal group dynamic, but it’s a long way from all-inclusive.

I’m probably the biggest heretic of all because I recognize the fact an all-inclusive community is a myth, and frankly, a detrimental myth.

Why do I call it detrimental? Simply because it underlines methodologies that don’t work.

With up to 80,000 people online at any time, best numbers shows around 1,500 are attending “Live music events”. And I feel should mention “Live Music” includes DJs.

I’ve also been told there are around 300 musicians performing in Second Life, if all of them were playing at the same time, 1,500 attendee divided by 300 performers mean would be pulling in five people per-show.

I understand it does not work like that. But getting a practical model of how it does work is almost impossible. There are “Live music events” listings and you could look at that and say there are four live music events happening between 1 PM SLT and 2 PM SLT. But that would not be accurate. It seems the venue owner doesn’t list most the events I play at all. I’m sure this is more of a norm then people realize.

Of course all of this is mathematical masturbation. There is NO practical model to analyze the performance of the current methodologies. All we can say with certainty is it’s not making any significant headways in getting people involved with live music.

Instead of an all-inclusive community, we need to develop the growth of “Organic communities”?

Organic communities happen naturally (hence the name). An example would be the help POL gave me at the start of my epic climb to the upper part of the bottom. He saw a musician that fit in with what he was doing and started featuring me at his shows. Of course, venues open to what POL was doing would also be open to what I’m doing.

Another example would be recently, Blindboy and myself made a “Lanny sandwich” with a new artist we both like named Lanrete Moonite. I played before him, drawing my crowd, and Blindboy played after him drawing his crowd. In the overlap between shows, people got an ear full of Lanny.

I feel Artist, Venues and Listeners make up an organic community. It’s informal and works pragmatically because there is no need for orthodoxy or politics. The informal nature also prevents it from trying to be all-inclusive. If we ever did try to establish it formally, suddenly things would change drastically.

When people wake up to the fact, community is where you find it, suddenly things will move toward growth.