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

Fans affect what gets played on radio and what sells obviously.. so why wouldn't fans also affect what does well on Ourstage? If you want objective voting, then you have to keep fans away for most of it. Our awards process is extremely objective, but if we opened it up in the early rounds to random voters, we'd have the same problem. So it's just a matter of choice.. do you want the fans to vote or would you rather have a panel of people choose the best instead?

And of course songs do differently each month.. different people vote differently. If they were always the same, that would be a warning flag that something was amiss.. random people vote in different ways. Sure, some songs are just so obviously good that they will always do better than average and vice versa, but I think the jumps up and down are very realistic and very representative of the moods of the wider voting public.

Look at is this way.. in our own awards where we had 8000 people vote last time, not a single voter got the top 5 songs right in order in any category. The awards before that was the same. The one before that had 1 single voter get the top 5 right in order.. want to know who that was? A 6 year old voting in the childrens category.

In addition, we've never had a single song get a top 5 vote from every voter.. in fact, it's rare for a song to get top 5 votes from even half of them. Our song of the year winners rarely have more than 50% of the voters in their category even thing the song is in the top 5 of that genre, let alone the entire awards.

I've learned a great deal about the dynamics of voters from watching it for the last 10 years in our awards processes. It's also interesting to see voting trends from different types of voters (i.e. artists, industry and fans). The only thing that is predictable is that it will be unpredictable. And usually fans are the best judges of what songs do the best as a group. I think artists often make the best decisions and industry seems to often be the most out of touch. Sad but true.

I think Ourstage is a very good learning tool. Figure out how to get a great start to your song (it's really critical). Learn what level of vocals and production you need to finish in the top 50%. Learn which of your songs do better than you expect and worse than you expect. That usually means YOU need to learn to evaluate your own work better (or find a third party to help you who "gets" it).

Brian