There are several reasons why OurStage cannot mandate that the channel winner be the one selected for a performance opportunity:

1. The festival must feel they have a wide degree of latitude for creative control. Else they wouldn't even offer us these opportunities.

2. The winner of a contest might have a great recording, but not a great live show or enough live experience. Again, creative control.

3. The fans voting might not be the same folks attending the festival. So the winning artist could have won the popular vote, but again the sound isn't what the festival sponsors are after.

4. There is no real winner for contests that run multiple months. There are multiple channel winners in these cases.

We TRY with each opportunity to have the festival organizations give specific feedback to the channel winners only as to why they weren't chosen, specifically to help the artist and provide valuable feedback. We also announce opportunity winners on our Web site (albeit, not always easy to find). Certainly an area of us to improve upon. Check the "In the News Section" where we tend to feature these.

Lastly, MANY great opportunities are moving into the Marketplace. So make sure you keep your EPK up-to-date, activate it and apply.

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From Jillian's post re: selecting winners for festival opportunities and such: "I brought this up once in the past, but nothing has come of it, and it's still irking me: Why is there no list of the artists who are actually winning the industry sponsored prizes? I'm certainly not trying to make any accusations, but I think it'd be nice if that information could be made public. Artists could potentially learn a lot from seeing who actually gets picked; it seems only logical."