JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Post QUESTIONS or COMMENTS here!

Mike,

You're pretty new, so it's clear you haven't really had a chance to see what goes on around here. Some simple math for you:

1. You stated there's hardly any traffic on the lyric and lyric 2 boards. Keep in mind that:

Lyric 1 was launched at the beginning of 2001. So it's been up for roughly 600 days. It has over 86,000 posts. That is 145 posts per day since it started.

Lyric 2 was launched about 120 days ago and already has just under 18,000 posts which is ironically.. 145 posts per day.

The feedback ratio for both boards is over 10 to 1. 86,000 responses to 8000 posts on lyric 1 and 17,645 responses to only 1493 posts on lyric 2. (which is actually well over 11 responses per post.)

How much more posting activity do you need?
Sure, things are a little slower right now because it is the end of summer. But that's a massive number of posts on just 2 of the 60 message forums here. As for eyeballs on the lyric posts, we get roughly 40K hits per day on this site. (Some days over 100K, some days only about 30K)... The message boards receive the lions share of those page hits. We have about 2000 unique visitors to the lyric boards per day. (Somedays only 1500.. some days over 5000...). The overall site has gotten over a million hits on average every month this year. There's a lot of traffic generated from the membership.

So.. your statements are observations made on a short term basis without all the facts, which are publicly shown on the boards. (See the Post and Replies stats for each message board.) Would we like more traffic? Sure.. but it's pretty good already.

As for all the simple things you proposed (auto responders, databases etc..) if you want to fund the cost of this happening, email me and I will be happy to take your money, hire a programmer AND (very important) someone on our end to handle the incoming votes, and enter the info into a database, which would be programmed by a qualified web programmer and updated regularly. I estimate that 2000 dollars would probably cover it, though that's shooting low for what you are suggesting to do it right and maintain confidentiality. If you can write that check, we'll put it into gear for right away.

I think that a lot of people would be very disappointed in the results, even if they were available. My experience tells me that what you'll find (as others have also suggested) that most lyrics will get 15 or less points.. then there will be a small collection (perhaps 20-30 lyrics) that have most of the rest of the votes. I can't imagine what value it would be to you, for example, to learn that you tied with 200 other lyrics at 11 points each (I am just making a number up of course.. I haven't even read your lyric yet.) We aren't asking folks for feedback on why they voted the way they did... just what they voted for period. Without feedback on why and who voted the way they did, there's even less value.

In the end, if we were doing this to make a profit (or in our case, any money at all..) we'd throw in some fancy bells and whistles.. but I don't think it would help anyone because the info is so minimal. I also actually don't believe that 500 people will vote. And that may not be a bad thing really. Because to be able to cast an honest vote, you'll need to spend substantial time reading ALL the lyrics. If we had 5000 people vote, I'd know that the majority skimmed or didn't even read most of the entries. Then it would be like the Grammys.. a popularity contest with no correlation to the quality of the music that wins whatsoever. We're trying to offer something different and hopefully better than that.

If I hear from more than 50% of the entrants that they WANT the final numbers to be posted, I would consider it. But in reality, I think those who want that to happen are in a tiny minority. So, lets see what everyone else thinks.

Brian