Originally Posted by ben willis
Thanks Micheal, and Jillian, I think that visual effects have their place. But not in a song contest. Period. What are [we] judging anyway? The song. Not the writer nor the performer. The only thing that is at stake is the song itself. There is no reason to enhance it with a visual display. The song should speak for itself. Anything else is bells and whistles, and that's not fair. Ben

Ben,
Good points, and generally I can't disagree! For one thing, I DO upload some nice images. It can be very time consuming to find the "perfect" image to go with each song's theme.

I'm not a professional photographer, so I have to license royalty-free images from places like iStockPhoto and ShutterPoint, etc. This is of course an additional expense, but I don't mind for general promotion purposes. I can license standard web-size images for .99 cents a piece which work perfectly fine on OurStage, so it's really not a problem, and if I wish, I can also add some text. But I've seen other artists post pure images with no text which also makes a nice impression for certain kinds of music, especially for instrumentals and certain channels such as New Age/World.

Beyond that, nothing needs to be changed except that the OurStage management could "gray out" images during the voting process. I've judged JPF song awards a number of times and have never seen any images, so if it's good enough for JPF, John Lennon, Great American Song Contest, USA Songwriting Competition, Unisong and all the rest, why not also for OurStage? Because the FANS decide! So you'll have to talk to the management... ha ha! grin

Anyway, interesting discussion!
Michael

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach

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