Blah Blah Cafe, the Jean-Michel Jarre forum

[Richard-Eastham]

Crowd size of Moscow is listed as 3.5 million yet if you measure the space in front of the university building it comes to approx. 31 hectares (310,000 sq. metres). If we assume 7 people per square metres, which is really packed in tight and the concert footage shows more relaxed groupings amongst the crowd, you only get 2.2 million people. So how did the official crowd size become so large? Is this Russian propaganda? Has the 3.5 million figure been questioned anywhere else? Or is this just me being paranoid?!

[Dr_Jones]

I always doubted the number myself, just like Rod Steward's Rio concert in 1994. I guess it's all a dick-measuring contest. But I was not there, so I'm not sure if there were screens placed on several places in the city. I know those screen count towards Rod's Rio crowd, so I bet these were also calculated into JMJ's Moscow crowd.

[Oxygene]

The Moscow university is situated on a hill that can be seen from all over the city. Since it was the 850th city anniversary they counted all the people in the city who attended the celebrations and were able to see the hill and the fireworks etc. At least that's what has been told at that time.

[Richard-Eastham]

I see! I didn't realise about the screens or the counting of people from much further out that could see the fireworks. Fair enough! Strange thing about Moscow is that it wasn't really a "city in concert" - using downtown buildings as the stage! - it was more like a "a single university building in concert". From a visual and stage set point of view, it was quite limited in scope. No big wide cityscape panorama. So to have such a large crowd size figure matched up with a relatively small visual focal point always seemed odd.