Step Inside the Rave Family Block Fest: The Most Ambitious Digital Music Festival to Date [FIRST LOOK]
With over 65 worlds almost 1,000 artists and to research to view, Rave Family Block Fest is the most ambitious game and EDM crossover up to now.
Societal media memories remind us of the music festivals rsquo, we all &; re. Without concerts, nearly everybody in the music industry is fighting to make ends meet. Associations, promoters, and Lots of artists are thinking beyond the box to provide fans a means to assist artists recover some earnings and to experience live music. We’ve ever noticed heaps of livestreamed festivals, drive-in concert tours, and special recorded performances out of unique places.
Thinking beyond the box, or should we say obstruct, is Rave Family with the introduction of their music experience, Rave Family Block Fest. The following month, concertgoers will log into the area of Minecraft to get a musical experience beyond the scope of whatever we’ve ever noticed before. Although this isn’t the first Minecraft-hosted festival to hit on the scene, Rave Family Block Fest is the biggest and most challenging of the group.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with the CEO of Rave Family, Jackie McGuire, to go over the mega-event and find a glance at how they intend to pull off this feat.
BEHIND THE BLOCKS
With an extensive history in both the technology and the EDM industries, McGuire and co. aren’t any strangers to both URL and IRL events. Even though Rave Family is not a household name, you may have crossed paths with them. In years past they provided infrastructure for music festivals in the kind of silent discos or general shops. They also worked hand-in-hand with medical teams to give areas for those who need maybe even host large parties within the festival and to provide their body or mind a break independently themselves.
McGuire’s kids, like many around the world, are big fans of Minecraft. Considering their parents ‘ specialized wizards, they had their own server to play with their friends on. As a result of frequent crashes, McGuire moved their server into the cloud, which prompted a daring concept to sponsor a little event in the match.
Spoiler Alert: case is far from small.
With the whole group sharing a passion for music and saying music festivals and the community surrounding them changed their lives for the better combined with the simple fact they have immense experience with scaling cloud servers, the event grew and grew and grew to the behemoth it’s today.
When talking on the reason why she started Rave Family, McGuire clarified going to festivals opened her worldview and assisted her to meet with new people. “There are a lot of people in the world who only ever interact with the same small group of people, and the more people you get to meet and interact with the more you realize that we’re all a lot more the same then we are different,” she informed EDM.com. “That was something that I really felt I got out of music and I wanted to provide to other people.”
THE FESTIVALBlock Fest Video (; 2:25)
Past Minecraft concerts have featured one or two stages and typically a dozen or so performers. Rave Family Block Fest will comprise over 65 stages and more than 950 artists at what is primed to be the event the game has ever seen in terms of scale. With nearly 1,000 performers across a shocking variety of genres, including dubstep, techno, house, trance, and even jam bands, this might be the only festival which may ever say “there’s something for everyone” and imply it. The lineup poster sized exactly the same and contains text onto it than some short stories, although studying you may have noticed there aren’t any tiers, phases, or headliners and that every act is in alphabetical sequence.
When talking with McGuire, we heard this was not because of spacing or style constraints. It was done intentionally to treat all artists alike and fight a number of these gatekeeping with getting booked for a show involved. “When we were booking this festival, I didn’t care who I was talking to,” she explained. “Be it nobody or somebody, our lineup poster is alphabetical order and everyone is the same size. If that’s a problem, we’re not the company for you to work with. ”
The stages are primarily hosted by artists or labels and their construction was led by fans, staff, or even many of the artists themselves. Don’t let the word “stages” make you think that these are simply recreations of a standard raised platform with turntables, though. The stages featured at Rave Family Block Fest are anything but basic, encapsulated in their own entrancing worlds with much to do and explore. Essentially, you won’t just spawn into a room with a stage and dancefloor–you’ll spawn into a pixelated paradise with space stations, meteors, aliens, and otherworldly views to explore.
Another area features a replica of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Inc. from The Office with an added underground warehouse stage for artists to take the decks. For the in-person concert aficionados in attendance, organizers have even included a replica of the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre. In addition to having a place to virtually dance and listen to tunes, these worlds are meant to be explored and interacted with. There will be minigames, secret areas, easter eggs, and more included across the 65 stages, so, like a real festival, there will be more to do than just watch the performances.
BUILDING A DIGITAL UTOPIA
When players log into Rave Family Block Fest, they will spawn into the main festival hub. From there, they’re welcome to meet up with their friends, plan their journey, or simply explore the large area chock full of pop-culture references, activities, and more. After a tour of the gargantuan festival grounds, our heads were spinning with not only how much substance was packed in, but also the meticulous level of detail. In an effort to make exploration simple, there are giant replicas of the TARDIS from Doctor Who scattered around that let players easily teleport from one area to another.
On the technical side of things, the organizers have exactly the right background to operate an event of this scale. Spearheaded by McGuire, who just so happens to have delivered the winning pitch at the 2018 iteration of the prestigious tech competition TechCrunch Disrupt, the team has an extensive background in virtual reality, augmented reality, and more. This has allowed them to use their knowledge to organize the event in such a way that makes an event of this scale possible while providing a lag-free experience.
This is done by hosting the festival on many different servers with each stage being its own entity and implementing a load balancer rather than using just one large server. For our experienced Minecraft readers, McGuire informed us that Rave Family Block Fest will be using a paper server rather than commonly used spigot servers, which will drastically increase performance. In addition to the server structure, when building the grounds, they’ve avoided the use of in-game building materials that are known to cause latency issues, which they state will create a smoother experience for all. Don’t let the idea of multiple servers scare you–players will not be forced to back out and reconnect the game multiple times, as all of the servers are connected through teleportation pads that make travel as easy as a mouse click.
Since the Minecraft application does not allow you to host in-game audio, Rave Family Block Fest partnered with Mixcloud Live to host legal DJ sets. As a result, every set will be cleared and the holders of the featured songs will be paid. Seeing as there are almost 1,000 performances, many of the stages and their respective artists will be playing their sets two times per day in order to help ease scheduling conflicts.
CONTINUOUS ECOSYSTEM
A typical barrier to entry for Minecraft-hosted events is access to the game. Although livestreamed festivals are often free and require no download, the experience is limited when compared to an interactive environment. McGuire has taken the cost of the game into consideration and has shared with us that she intends to host monthly iterations of Rave Family Block Fest and create a continuous space for digital rave squads to party while in COVID-19-induced lockdown. She explained how after the initial outing, they intend on keeping things fresh month to month while also giving artists the ability to transform their personal spaces.
“The strategy is to perform these once a month,” said McGuire. “So each month, we’re planning to build a new major festival area and subsequently the artists can continue to change and improve on their individual servers. So they all needed to perform a different theme and should they have a record coming out, they can. It’s going to be this whole ecosystem which exists till we go to live shows “
Fortunately, Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, so many potential attendees already own the game. If one does not own a copy, the full version only costs $30 and is genuinely a fantastic game that can be enjoyed even without an EDM crossover event.
As reported earlier in the month, the festival’s original name was Electric Blockaloo. This was inspired by the movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and the movement behind the film but was changed due to an extremist group taking on a similar name. Alongside the name change, the date of the festival was pushed back two weeks, as Minecraft recently released a massive update that will require organizers to implement some compatibility updates. Rave Family has stated that while they are sad to push back the festival, it was a necessary move that will help ensure a better experience for players.
Another roadblock arrived when allegations of sexual assault were made against one of the festival’s performers, Space Jesus, who was to host his own stage. After Space Jesus publicly responded, McGuire took action. “If there is one thing which we’re able to say for sure about 2020, it is that folks are done being hushed,” she told us. “In that spirit, I need to unequivocally state that Space Jesus and the Moon Dot stage will not be a part of our festival.”
“If you see or hear about someone doing something wrong and you do nothing about it, you are complicit, which applies to several of the injustices which we’re confronting in the entire world,” she continued. “I applaud the people who have spoken out and could only expect that more will feel empowered to do so when they see real action being accepted. As a company, we will continue to stand and believe by anyone who speaks their truth, and we will continue to attempt and lift the voices of those who were silenced for too long.”
THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL EVENTS
What started as a collecting for a couple of friends has grown out of a little snowball into a Titanic-sinking iceberg very quickly. What Rave Family is currently creating is beyond whatever we’ve ever noticed from gaming and EDM crossovers. Rather than a digital performance area, with a bevy of worlds to investigate, they and the addition of mini-games ’ve created what is essentially a music festival MMO equally appreciated by players and ravers alike. With the guarantee of events, artists being paid for their performances, each of the songs being cleared and legal, and more, McGuire’s premonition that occasions that are digital will change as we all know it looks like a bullseye.
Rave Family Block Fest takes place July 9th to 12th within Minecraft. Tickets are available now. For more information about how best to join in on the fun and to purchase tickets for squad and yourself, head over to their official website here.
Article Source and Credit edm.com https://edm.com/features/rave-family-block-fest-first-look Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buytickets.com
