@unoclay said:

I appreciate the opinions expressed here, and you've done as good a job as one might hope toward convincing me that people who weren't at a show have a better (or even equal) ability to comment on a show than someone who was there.

That said, I always put the primacy of importance on people who were actually there--who actually experienced the SHOW, not merely 'the music'.

I could argue both sides here, but I feel strongly that the obvious answer is this: everyone knows that the non-audible real life experiences add to the show memory, that's a given. It's nice to document those facts too; hopefully, people do in their own show reviews.

But our recaps are mostly evaluations of the music itself, a primer for people looking to understand which shows are worth hearing after the fact. Otherwise, all we're doing is preserving one person's experience. That's not really a recap, that's a review, tag it on with the rest of the reviews.

A recap should be a neutral take on the music, that's what our goal was. Yes, it's still subjective, but that's somewhat offset by the fact that we're all hearing just the music - there are no bunk shrooms or glorious gooballs that might be affecting the interpretation. The heat isn't killing us and the gorgeous rainbow isn't making us into softees. At the end of the day, the recap is about music, and reviews are about personal experiences.

At least, that's how we see it.