Minecraft Music Festivals Keep The Live-Show Community Spirit Alive And Thriving

By Eli Enis


Last month, in the midst of quarantine, an one-night music festival drew 130,000 attendees and raised $50,000 for charity. It was called Square Garden, it featured artists like Charli XCX, Cashmere Cat, and 100 gecs, also it all took place in the video game Minecraft. Best of all, it wasn’t an isolated event.


Just two weeks ago, emo legends American Football headlined another Minecraft festival called Nether Meant (a cheeky misnomer of their iconic song “Never Meant”) alongside artists like Anamanaguchi and Baths. In mid-April, a different emo and punk-centric Minecraft festival called Fourchella — a stand-in for a postponed real-life festival of the same name — featured bands like Origami Angel and Retirement Party. And on May 16, a Minecraft festival called Block By Blockwest — featuring Nothing, Nowhere, Cherry Glazerr, Pussy Riot, and nearly 40 others — will make its second attempt right after so several people joined its April edition that servers crashed inside of the initial minute.


Yet they’ve recently begun to prepare headlines and seem designed for a global in lockdown, Minecraft music festivals have actually been happening semi-regularly for about two years. However over the last couple months of international quarantine, they’ve gone from a niche option to real-life festivals to one of the few options anyone has for a “public” celebration of live music. For instance, the small-time Philadelphia musical group Courier Club, who are putting with each other the entirety of Block By Blockwest, crafted the idea in early March once tour cancellations were just starting to ripple by means of the music industry.


“It stemmed from us joking around on Twitter one night, being like, ‘If our tour gets canceled we’re just gonna throw a show on Minecraft,’” frontman Timothy Waldron told MTV News. “And, welp, the tour got canceled.”


As the return of in-person concerts in a post-COVID-19 society remains uncertain, Minecraft festivals distribute a unique experience unlike any other established livestream. They’re also notably different from the concert that rapper Travis Scott recently held in the video game Fortnite, which was more like an interactive music video than a communal gathering of like-minded music fans. Minecraft festivals have a much different energy.


“The biggest thing I think is immersiveness,” mentioned Eden Segal-Grossman, a core team member of the business Open Pit, who were accountable for putting on Square Garden, Nether Meant, and several of the initial successful Minecraft festivals. “It’s an experience that you could really be in rather than just watch from outdoors. You get the same feeling of visiting an actual concert, I’ve noticed, soon after an event in Minecraft. Although you’re sitting at residence, you still feel like you’ve been to something big — you’ve been a segment of something bigger than yourself.”


That special feeling is hard to describe, especially considering the several ways Minecraft festivals are unlike real-life concerts. Artist’s sets are pre-recorded (live combining from 40 different streaming locations could be a nightmare), each person at the show is a blockhead figure (Minecraft is by no means a visually realistic game), and both the artists and the fans are house in back of their screens in physical isolation. However somehow, witnessing an artist “perform” in a virtual venue is much more satisfying and transcendental than watching an one-dimensional live set on Instagram.


“I’m not really sure what it is that makes that magic work,” Segal-Grossman mentioned. “It’s something about the mixture of seeing so several virtual avatars jumping around in front of you, seeing the chat go crazy with people super excited about whoever’s playing, getting converse with the artists and take screenshots with them.”


“It’s interesting how although you’re not actually seeing the artist in person — you don’t visualize their face, you don’t hear them talking — they’re still somehow.”


there really are two ways to attend a Minecraft music festival. Fans who own the game can join the specific server where the festival is going down whenever they stream the audio portion through community app Discord. Once they’re in, they can hang out on the dance floor, romp around the expansive map, take part in parkour challenges, and purchase real-life merch from virtual merch booths. Although, the way most people experience these fests is by streaming someone else playing the game through Twitch or YouTube, which gives you access to a live chat of fans excitedly reacting from beyond their keyboards.


Nevertheless this alternative removes you from interacting in the map itself, the chat is surprisingly efficient at manifesting the enthusiasm of cheering and other physical expressions that can’t translate by way of the game. It also creates a whole new element of the concert experience in which you could visualize people verbally reacting to the music without the interruptive nature of someone yammering in your ear at a live gig. For Anamanaguchi songwriter Peter Berkman, that’s one of the most thrilling characteristic of the complete Minecraft festival affair.


“There's no such thing as sort talking at a show or festival,” he mentioned. “No text at all. It's cheering, or booing, or whichever can be reduced to the reaction of studio audience. There is a lot more nuance to the crowd-artist relationship in this way as soon as it's mediated through writing.”


Anamanaguchi are veterans of the Minecraft festival circuit. They played Open Pit’s inaugural event Coalchella (Open Pit love pun titles) in September 2018, which featured roughly 60 acts — mostly DJs, electronic producers, and weirdo Soundcloud pop artists. That’s the public of musicians that Open Pit was place on Earth from, and Square Garden — which was hosted and co-coordinated by their companions in 100 gecs, who also played at Coalchella — felt like a celebration of how far their scene has come. The complete map was littered with easter-egg references to artists who were playing (like a courtyard called “Claws Clementine Grove,” named after recent Charli XCX single “Claws”) and the stage was in the thick of a gigantic tree, which has become somewhat of a totem for 100 gecs fans.


Other maps are slightly more realistic. Nether Meant took place in a fantastical replica of the Brooklyn venue Elsewhere, which Open Pit dubbed “Elseswither,” and Courier Club are basing the Block By Blockwest venues on the particular stage schematics for the legendary German festival Rock am Ring. Minecraft is all about building, so the potential for epic stages is virtually limitless. And unlike a IRL festival the size of Rock am Ring, which draws a similar variety of attendees to witness some of the hugest acts in all of rock music, Minecraft fests give small artists the chance to shine in front of 130,000 (or more) people. That’s segment of Open Pit’s mandate whenever they put with each other lineups, and since Courier Club are an actual DIY musical group who put on small-time events in non-pandemic times, that mentality carries over into Block By Blockwest.


“That energy got taken away with quarantine. I think this is sort of where we put it all,” Waldron said.


These eclectic, immersive, creative, and free-to-stream festivals are a ton of fun — up until the servers crash. However there’s technically no maximum capacity in any given Minecraft map, virtual festivals aren’t one of the game’s intended features, and once thousands of players attempt to enter a map in a short window of time, things get buggy. Open Pit has been working toward mitigating this problem for years by bringing on an actual Minecraft coder onto their team, who’s helped build custom servers to try and support the large loads of a complimentary, open-to-the-public music festival. Yet even they still experience issues with servers crashing.


“It’s a game that’s designed to be played with maybe 100 people maximum, yet generally more like 10 or 20,” Segal-Grossman mentioned. “So just shoving thousands of people onto an individual game server just doesn’t go well. People aren’t able to connect. People can’t play. It just crashes the full thing.”


Courier Club experienced a particularly nasty bout of this at Block By Blockwest, which was originally scheduled for April 24, yet ended up getting postponed just 30 minutes into the festival soon after they attracted thousands more attendees than they ever expected.


“We were expecting around 10,000 players while in during the day and about 30,000 streaming it,” Waldron mentioned. “But we had 7,000 players in the initial second and then any time we shut everything down I think we had around 88,000 people streaming the festival. And we shut things down about 30 minutes into the festival.”


As Waldron explains it, they were running on a custom server with 128 gigabytes of RAM, however they required nearly 100 times that (10 terabytes) to actually performer name the collection of participants they obtained. Since then, they’ve invested in the genuine quantity of infrastructure and are willing to try again on May 16 with even more decorative maps.


“Having this several servers is what massive businesses run off of,” Waldron says. “But we’re at the point right now where it’s like, we have to prepare it happen.”


Fortunately, Courier Club was able to get some sponsors to mask the bills, nevertheless the musical group isn’t producing any cash off of this festival. Segal-Grossman says Open Pit was paid to build the map and help with promotion for Square Garden, yet other than that, these festivals are all being put with each other on a volunteer basis. None of the artists get purchased their sets, either. That’s an obvious obstacle for not just Minecraft festivals, however livestreaming events overall — especially because Courier Club and Open Pit want these events to be free for fans.


“It began out from our distaste of festivals costing so much money,” Waldron mentioned. “It becomes a little bit lame at a certain point. You’re a kid and also you wish to go visualize your preference musical group, [but] you've got to fork out a $1000 ticket.”


Although, artists need to prepare make some cash somehow, and the Washington, D.C. Emo musical group Origami Angel noticed a clever way of doing that. The festival they were playing, Fourchella, also experienced server issues that prevented them from being able to control their characters in-game. As a substitute, they just streamed the audio from their set — which frontperson Ryland Heagy had pulled an all-nighter just 12 hours before to record — on Twitch. In the middle of their stream, the band’s label, Counter Intuitive Records, messaged them and suggested to press the audio of their set on vinyl and put it up for pre-orders right following the festival. The musical group agreed and the opening Minecraft “live album” was born.


“I thought he was joking, yet he was being for real, also it was so impulsive and fun,” Heagy mentioned. “There was not even really a plan for this thing to exist even 16 hours before pre-orders went up.”


now, Minecraft festivals are a wholesome escape from our bleak timeline plus a constructive way of keeping the spirit of music communities alive and well. Yet even right after quarantine is eventually lifted and real-life concerts resume, Open Pit and Courier Club believe that these events, whether on Minecraft or a different virtual platform, will serve a critical purpose in years to come.


“There are all sorts of barriers about going to real-life events," Segall-Grossman mentioned. "Things like cash, access to transport. Some people don’t like being in big audiences. Some people just don’t have people to go with. Things like that are all barriers that I think we can solve to some extent. It’s an experience that there’s nothing else really like it, I think.”


@they could be their own thing entirely, although as Waldron puts it, they still feel distinctly human.


“I think that being in a virtual world, although you’re just with a bunch of blockheads jumping up and down, it feels very human and yes it still hits the same way, weirdly enough.”