JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum So Where Does Your Song Rank On Ourstage?

A few things.

1. If you are having trouble judging songs it is very likely a problem with your computer, your web browser, or your internet connection. The site makes use of a lot of Flash and advanced coding. I've been on it since early February and it is pretty rare to see an actual site technical problem, except in the middle of the final round, where thousands of people are voting on the same songs at once. You cannot blame them if you are having a problem with your computer.

2. Before the quarterfinals (eg. any day before today), foul play is simply NOT possible. There are hundreds of songs in even the smallest categories, and thousands in the biggest. If you wanted to somehow vote down a high-ranking song, you would have to vote hundreds or thousands of times to even see it once - and then when you do, it's only one vote that you contributed!!! Considering all the votes that songs get throughout the month, one vote simply doesn't make a big difference at all. The only way anyone can even attempt to cheat the system prior to the quarterfinals is using an automated system. Jill and I know people that tried this two months in a row. It didn't work; their songs were reset to the bottom of the pile.

3. For those of you complaining about your songs dropping, excuse me for being blunt, but you need to get thicker skins. In a contest like this your song is NEVER locked in. OurStage is a very popular site with a ton of users, and a flood of new people coming in all the time. It is not as if everyone votes within the first ten days and then stops. There are constantly new people voting, or old people that only choose to vote towards the end of the month. I for one didn't vote at all this month until yesterday, at which point

4. Why would you ever withdraw your songs from the site or stop participating? That is one of the silliest things I've ever heard. There's NO cost of any kind to enter. It requires no maintenance, no time investment, nothing. You just upload your songs, enter them, and check towards the end of the month to see if you made it into the quarterfinals. Even at this point, you're not required to do anything, though it's advisable that you take the 5-10 minutes (wow!!!) to send an email to your fans or post on your site asking your friends & fans to vote for you. By removing your songs from the contest you are literally doing nothing except hurting yourself. Even if you only had a one in 50,000 chance of winning, it would still be worth entering, because there is no risk or cost to doing so, only the possibility of massive gains.

5. Both myself, Jillian Goldin, and our friend sgx are proof that the site is fair and that it works very well. That is not to say that all of our songs are always in the top 10. This month, many of our songs did not make it into the quarterfinals. In fact, none of mine did. I am not complaining. I know that the voting population shifts and changes every month, people might get sick of hearing the same song, etc. But Jill entered a couple new songs this month in new categories (including some highly competitive ones) and DID make it into the quarters.

The only time OurStage's voting system is at all exploitable is at the end of the contest when there are very few songs left. This is the part where unscrupulous artists can ask their fans to "vote down" competing music. We certainly do not endorse this practice and encourage our fans to vote for us, but vote honestly. More importantly, those who rely on voting down never seem to get very far. After all it didn't hurt Jillian or sgx when they won the grand prizes.

6. It can be surprising when your songs that you think are weak or merely average rise high above those you entered that YOU thought were amazing. But again, this really has little to do with OurStage. Artists are notoriously bad judges of the quality of their own music; no offense to anyone here, as it's true for me as well. Several songs that I am quite fond of that I enter each month continue to not make it into the quarterfinals. I'm finally beginning to accept that maybe, after hundreds of votes, the average listener on the site just doesn't like it as much as I do. You can't accuse that many people of being biased or having the "wrong" opinion. If nothing else, as Brian once pointed out, OurStage is a great way of testing the waters with a song to see what the average reaction is to it.

Edit: It appears that Brian beat me to the punch by three and a half minutes