Why ‘Acts’?
Over the years that I’ve been involved with this publication (and website), I’ve had the occasional query (and the occasional webboard flame) about why we list musicians as ‘Acts,’ rather than, say, ‘bands’ or ‘artists’ or even ‘performers.’
The answers - and there is more than one - is first and foremost a result of how we keep track of all those many folks and their groups who play here. The LMN website is a dynamic website, meaning that each page is assembled on the fly from data gathered from a data table. One of those data tables is a list of the names under which musicians have performed or want to be known by. That table is labeled ‘Acts.’
So, why did I pick that label rather than the others? Way back when that table was first designed, I was using an MS-DOS database application, which limited the names for various files - including data tables - to eight letters, so ‘Acts’ fit that nicely and ‘performers’ was out. The word is also shorter than any of the other choices, which meant fewer keystrokes while writing all the forms I needed to use. Just lazy, I suppose.
However, the real reason was even more pragmatic - I needed a term that would apply to solo performers, duos, trios and so on, up to and including orchestras and, later, comedians. That eliminated ‘bands,’ since a solo performer is most definitely not a band.
That leaves ‘artists’ as a possible choice. At this point, history and preference come into play. Historically, any performer or group of performers was called at ‘act’ in the vaudeville era. Individual musicians were, occasionally, called ‘artists,’ but groups were not artists, so that was enough to eliminate that term, at least as far as I was concerned.
Currently, however, the term ‘artist’ is used fairly indiscriminately where talking about entertainers of all stripes and talent and here, I confess, my personal preference - even prejudice - comes into play. For the life of me, I cannot image referring to either Paris Hilton or Kevin Federline or others like them as ‘artists.’ Entertainers, yes, in a often gruesome sort of way, like watching a really terrible car crash, but artists? No. If we use the word for them, what word do we have left we encounter the genuine article? (Sorry, superstar is already overdone.)
So that’s it. You have a comment, by all means, post it.