I organise virtual music festivals. AMA

The only cost is buying the game itself for ~$25. This is another important factor into why we chose it, because all of our events have been exclusively for charity we all work on them voluntarily. Maybe the cost of sanity during the last minute crunches could be considered, though. :sweat_smile:

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Do you mean that your events have been sponsored, or do you charge people to attend?

Did you know that organising events is the 5th most stressful job in the world! Last minute crunches definitely count :rofl:

All of our events are free to attend (beyond the cost of Minecraft itself). We give option to donate a minimum of $5 for “VIP” status, which gives the attendee exclusive merch and “backstage access” in game and in the discord, where they can talk to the artists playing. We use a small amount ~$80 to cover our server hosting costs and then donate the rest to the charity we chose for the event.

Our concert with American Football raised around $8000 for Good360 and Square Garden with 100 gecs raised $50,000 for Feeding America.

Minecraft seems to have lots of potential for creating completely new event formats. What cool event ideas have you seen?

As a musician yourself, have you ever played on Minecraft?

That’s amazing, well done!

Hi @laketony have you got experience in streaming online music festivals yourself?

We’ve seen some spinoff ones of the events we’ve done! During one of our earlier events a group of players ran into the desert and started their own “nightclub” deep underground. It was a while before we noticed but by that point there was already a crowd and they had hijacked a discord voicehcat to DJ in.

Yeah, i’ve played a few of our events. It’s fun to make the sets for them, creating parodies of pop songs but with Minecraft related lyrics is something that happens a lot.

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Can you share some links to videos so we can check out some of the festivals you have organised?

Open Pit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm-oYy01wrkaaUrgC9PpFkA/videos

Minecraft Birthday Party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxS2MWrZZd0

Coalchella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRoB6UO8EuA

Fire Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d63Ugo61U-o

Nether Meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlRYiby9nEU&t=207s

Here’s a good video someone made describing them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaRy1W84W2Y

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I’ve been using group streams on twitch with shared logins as opposed to the mixlr integration that OpenPit is using on their sites. I’ve always loved OpenPit’s web platforms. Eden’s a GOAT truly.

I really appreciate OpenPit’s multiplatform approach to having an audio website, a discord, a twitch stream (like the gecs event) and on Minecraft simultaneously, lots of ways for a viewer to feel involved with the show! <3 rootin 4 ya OpenPit!

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How many people are involved @laketony and @maxschramp? Seems like a big team is needed to manage all the streams and the social media? And have you ever had any major tech meltdowns during an event?

We have 8 people on the “core team,” and many more who help with building. Usually our servers are unstable for the first hour but then they balance out. As long as the music is continuing to play the audience is usually happy though!

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the Mixlr embed seems way more reliable in connecting sets seamlessly than a group twitch stream where the organizer turns the keys over to each performer to continue the stream. we’re still very small testing it out to see what works best for us. a lot of our artists have premade visuals for their sets so twitch works for that. but i’m leaning more towards how OpenPit uses Mixlr.

even when the Minecraft world crashes, the OpenPit streams are still going smoothly, which a great viewer experience. and the OpenPit team is always super communicative and fast-acting to respond to tech issues. major team inspiration : )

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@laketony Do you have any links you could share for your events? How many do you have working behind the scenes during one of your events?

appreciate the interest <3 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/607720981

and ty Max for the AMA, you and your team are doing such a great job producing consistently high quality fests. i’ve loved every one! excited for the next one!

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That’s a wrap folks! Thank you for all of your questions and thank you Max @maxschramp for hosting our second Ask Me Anything session.

Check out the events that Max and Open Pit run at https://openpit.net/

Do stick around, have a look around the forum and join the conversations or ask more questions on some of the other topics.

We’ll see you at 4pm UK time next week, 19th May 2020, for our next Ask Me Anything!

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