In one brief moment I’d betrayed my former principles (as explained here last November) by recording the moment instead of just living within it. The truth is, I’m not alone, it’s something we all do – irrespective of how crap our phone-cameras might be.

One of the most popular areas of our vast online coverage of the Summer Of Live Music has been the photo galleries, as submitted by you lot by text or e-mail from many a festival site, park or field. For Hard Rock Calling alone this has contributed to almost 50,000 page views as you sought to re-live the experience, see what it was like or look at how everyone else enjoyed it.

As you’ll know our coverage of live events has been spectacular this year, we’ve excelled ourselves with video interviews, live and streamed broadcasts, reviews and photos. As if to verify and celebrate our input and output you’ve joined us to do the same. This is at the core of our communal experience – it’s about sharing. It’s not enough to just be there, you want to show you’ve been there and to share the magic with others.

For me, so far, the central highlight of our Summer of Live Music has been the more extravagant use of the material we’ve recorded – particularly the music itself which you can’t have failed to hear popping up in every programme as part of the ‘free live music every day’ policy.

Once upon a time many live gig recordings were shoddy, marred by sound quality as muddy as the fields they were recorded in. Those that made it to disc and into memory were either very expensively recorded or painstakingly overdubbed at a later date in a proper recording studio.

Advances in technology across all sectors has meant that live music now sounds a lot better on-air, you can almost feel that you were there – whether you actually were or not. The Summer of Live Music is a shared experience, in sound and vision; at least it is as far as we’re concerned, with 69,500 page views of our Hard Rock Calling coverage alone it would seem that you agree.