Upon joining the Second Life Music Development Mailing List (see: The Linden Lab Announcement of the Music Development Mailing List) one of the many topics that were brought up concerned the use of the Live Music event listing category in Second Life. While the topic generated a few complaints, such as DJ’s were placing listings in the Live Music Category and that listings were being placed for DJ events (which many people felt did not properly fit Live Music), events were being misclassified as Live Music events and should be place elsewhere, I was skeptical that the problem was as wide spread or as heavy of an issue as it were. In response to this issue and complaints I decided to take a look at the use of the use of this category in an informal manner, in an attempt to figure out how the event listing was being used and should any recommended changes be suggested to Linden Lab. To perform this study I did the following:
- Searched for all events under the live music category (including mature area regions) and listed the first 24 that appeared (these would be the first 24 that show up without doing any searching or any additional scrolling),
- Categorized each event based on the event description,
- Compare the performer with the person listed as placing the event to see if there were any discrepancies,
- Indicated if an event was posted multiple times (the same event with multiple listings)
The purpose of this study was to discover the use of the Live Music category in Second Life in order to suggest changes and recommendations to better assist the Second Life music community. I also wanted to get a better glimpse of how the Live Music event category was being used in Second Life. Read the Full Report