Recording Live Bands on Camera Phones, then Uploading it to YouTube

Today's TNM post subject comes from none other than the almighty Infidelamsterdam himself, Ed Veter! Ed hails from Amsterdam, Netherlands and is a true metal YouTube sensation. He is world renowned for his insightful and often hilarious YouTube vlogs about his opinions of music, his personal life and responses to questions and comments from fans and foes alike. If you haven't heard of him, punch yourself in the face, then go check out his channel on YouTube post-immediately. Thanks for reading, Ed, and thanks for the subject idea! 


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DIE IN A FIRE. 

I hope your car flips before you get home and your face is smashed in by a twisted mess of steel, glass and pavement. Not enough to kill you of course, I'm not so morbid. It just needs to be enough of a crash to leave you a brain dead, comatose vegetable covered in weeping family members and infected bed sores for the rest of your shallow life as a human husk. Either that, or you regain consciousness decades later when all of your loved ones are DEAD or have forgotten about you, and you're paralyzed from the forehead down. Anything to stop you from uploading that half a mega-pixel video you just recorded of The Black Dahlia Murder on your last-generation Blackberry to the internet.

When you raise your hands at a metal show, you do it to give the horns, clap, or flip the bird at a band that sucks. (The "invisible grapefruit" claw is also acceptable.) That's it. If I see you lifting up your trendy little camera phone so you can record a blurry, barely legible visage of a human being holding an instrument while simultaneously blowing your phone's microphone with decibel levels far beyond what it is capable of capturing, I'm going to smack it out of your limp-wristed hand. 

Are you legally retarded? Don't your very few friends or (probably mother), complain to you about how static-ridden a conversation is with you and just your loud mouth alone? What dimension of time and space do you hail from where you assume that tiny ant hole of a microphone located on the bottom of your mobile device is going to be capable of capturing a decent quality recording of a live metal act from 10 feet away? I also assume it's the same dimension where you think people will find it pleasant to watch/listen to whatever aural and visual travesty you have recorded on your cheap gadget.

To find a proper example of this inexcusable internet phenomena, one merely has to type in a band name and the word "live" in the YouTube search bar. That's it. Every metal act, no matter how technical, has at least one fan stupid enough to bring that amount of a shame to a band's live performance by uploading what I struggle to call a "video" of it that he/she captured on his/her cell phone. I don't care what lowercase letter your phone's model name begins with, it's not a good enough piece of equipment to do what you're doing with it. A cell phone's camera is good for capturing only the following events:

- Girls fighting.
- The police beating up a hood rat that deserved it.
- Bigfoot.
- People getting hurt by acting stupid. (See police beating up hood rats)
- Your hideous children doing or saying something typical and underwhelming. Subsequently, putting it on the internet will guarantee you the most YouTube hits of all time. 


All of these things are okay to record with your mobile phone because they don't involve music. I guess after you get through all my berating and threats of harm, that's really the point behind all of this: the music. If you look past my daily gripes about wardrobe and concert etiquette, I am a fan of music. At the end of the day, that's really what matters to me. You could be a Christian, gauge-eared, dreadhead wearing bondage pants, and you wouldn't concern me a quarter as much as somebody taking my favorite songs and putting them through the aural cheese grater that is a cheap, tinny cell phone microphone. It's nothing more than an insult to a musician's art form.

I guess to really get the point across to the individuals that are guilty of this, I would have to consider your motives for doing it in the first place. A possibility would be that these musicians are celebrities to you, and you wanted to prove to others that you were only a few feet away from your metal gods. Maybe you're not so focused on capturing the song and its performance, but recording your overall experience to share with others. It might be a combination of both; either way, no matter what angle you approach this, I still can't personally agree with what you're doing. Why would you share your concert experience with a bunch of jerkoffs you don't know? They didn't buy those tickets. You did. You planned your day, traveled distances and paid money to be at this show. Why should those who didn't do all that, get to see what you saw? Maybe thinking that way makes me a naturally selfish person, but when I buy a taco, I eat it myself.

Keep your phone in your pocket... nay, in your vehicle. You don't need anybody bugging you with phone calls, it's time for some metal. After all, the last thing you want is to fall on top of your fancy new mobile phone when you inevitably get knocked on your ass in the pit.

4G speeds don't mean dick when your phone is broken in half. Consider that a threat.