Originally Posted by Andrew Aversa
I have had a number of songs make it into the quarter, semi, or straight-up finals using nothing more than a picture of my album art; the text "zircon - Antigravity" with a green design, an upside-down iguana, and some bamboo. It's really not that amazing. sgx, the April grand prize winner, won with nothing more than a shot of his album art too, and while it's quite cool, it's not so amazing that it would have propelled him that far.

Having the album art shown is a great idea. It makes judging go a LOT faster, for one thing, because it's easier to see an image and associate it with a song than to actually read the smaller text underneath the image.


Hey, buddy! The art on my Coactive track is not album art. It's a screenshot from the interactive remixing flash toy I made also called Coactive: www.sgxmmusic.com/coactive.htm smile

I do think good art is important if you are trying to win. People are affected by superficial things. You wouldn't show up to court in shabby clothes, so why enter a competition and not put up a good appearance?

I do a little graphic design and I've been using ourstage as a little exercise for myself: every time I add a new song, I do a quick 15 minute design for the track's ourstage image that I think will represent how the track sounds.

Of course, not everyone is a graphic designer, but not having a quality image or album cover kind of just suggests that you're not serious about your music enough to present the whole package well. Ideally, the music should speak for itself, and it does to an extent, but in reality other aspects affect perception too.

Other things I think helped me:

People are impatient. Your song needs to get awesome or sound like it will be awesome within that first 15 seconds of required listening.

My winning track Coactive is actually 5:30 long on the album. I entered my 2:30 edit on Ourstage and won the grand prize. I am SO glad I did that. This short edit gets the point, keeps your interest, and concludes itself in a tight, effective package.

Having fans that are willing to spend time voting for you is helpful also. I've got folks on a couple of message boards, visitors on my website, and people who've signed up for my mailing list that I asked to visit ourstage and vote for me. I think I would have done well, but maybe not won if I didn't have the help. Some people may not like that some artists with a following might have a bit of an advantage, but to that I say:

1) Ourstage encourages this. They sent an email (or was it a message on the site) to all quarterfinalists in March's competition suggesting that we do things like that to get fans to sign up and vote for us. It gets them traffic which is what they want. This is how Ourstage expects it to be played.

2) I earned those fans and I will use them. I didn't happen upon my listeners by luck - I've worked hard on music for about 7 years having a continuous online presence with a website I built myself, lots of free mp3 downloads, lots of online community participation, answering emails asking me advice on gear and technique, and most of all, making what I would call good music. Dues have been paid, I think smile


Oh, also remember, that it is probably futile to try to vote for yourself or get others to vote for you before the quarterfinals. Your song won't come up often enough in such a huge pool to make it worth anybody's time. Just hope you get into the quarters, but that's often a crapshoot since you'll only get maybe 10 listens. I had a track (which was a collab with a rap vocalist) in the hip-hop genre finish something like 2715th! The song doesn't suck, but I think the five people who listened probably hated the electronic sound in there and the track got buried to hell!


http://www.sgxmusic.com