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

Jim,

Here's your points:

1. All entries should be in before competition starts and placed randomly.... no late entries allowed. Positions throughout the month should not be given.

Ourstage has a system they use. You know it very well (better than most). You still choose to participate. Then, when it doesn't give the results your like, you complain about the system that you knew all about in the first place? Your bad. If you don't like how they do it, don't participate.

Artists are proscrastinators. People could have entered the JPF awards last February. But when the deadline came on August 31st for older entries, I had 100's of emails upset that I didn't give them more time to enter. I am STILL getting emails from people months after that deadline saying they just got around to wanting to enter. If you have a site that depends on artist participation, you have to make it as easy as possible for someone to participate on their own terms. So letting folks enter any time they want is a must. This isn't a paid contest. I think when money is at stake, then you can justify tighter entry times. But when it's an ever evolving system that has very different judges coming in throughout the month, the more flexible the better. If they don't find reasons for people to visit the site throughout the month and get involved, they won't have enough traffic to keep the site going. Their choice then would be to charge artists or shut down. I think they are amazing for a free site. And if your goal is to find great music from any source and identify it, then that goal is very well served by letting people enter anything at anytime. It's not a closed "for pay" contest with entry fees and a prize package. If the best song out there comes in at the middle of the month, then it's the best song. Who cares when it was entered?

As for the tracking of where things rank. Checking on rankings (and bragging to fan bases that you're doing well) is an important part of keeping artists engaged in the process. If you don't keep them engaged, they don't even remember they entered in the first place. I know this first hand. We have people already who forgot they entered our awards just a few months ago via CD Baby and have just now noticed an email from us and want to know why we contacted them. We explain they entered our awards and many of them argue with me that they didn't. I show them the evidence that they had to not only answer an email, but log into their own account, click 2 more links and then fill out a form by clicking boxes next to what they wanted to enter. I also explain that we've sent them 6 emails about it since they entered all which were confirmed as delivered. THEN they often go.. oh.. sorry.. "I forgot." Artists are their own worst enemies. But when you depend on participation from them to exist, you have to do anything you can to make it easy for them to remain engaged. The ranking system does that. Most artists who care will check in throughout the month to see how they are doing. They will also tell their fans and other artists. That word of mouth is crucial. Without it, then Ourstage would have to become a pay site. And the last thing we need is another one of those out there.

I agree that during the finals, songs shouldn't be ranked. Instead they should show the rankings of the previous months finals to show how great those songs were (I think they do far too little to promote previous winners). By doing that, I think gaming would be nearly impossible beyond just voting FOR a particular song, which is ALWAYS going to happen in public voting no matter what. But some at Ourstage disagree with that. It's been made clear to me that they aren't willing to budge on that at this time. The way I see it, you win some and you lose some. We've just agreed to disagree at on that one.

2. Each song should have equal amounts of battles and compete against ALL the other songs. This would mean smaller categories so that voters would have to have voted on complete sets of battles rather than just a random few before their votes count.

You got your wish on that already. So you should be happy. The way that happens is that they have to play catch up with songs posted later which is why songs come up multiple times over others. But if you judge the ENTIRE category.. you'll find that every song gets judged roughly the same number of times. The program goes through algorhythms to balance the votes out. I've actually voted an entire category and each song came up the same number of times eventually. If the songs you WANTED to come up DID.. then you could manipulate the results far more easily. There are also features that check on system gaming and that can also affect what comes up and when. The site tests whether someone is consistent in their voting, or showing habits displayed when people cheat. This is a good thing.

3. You should not be allowed to keep entering the same songs month after month.

They are serving the artist community. Most have made it clear they want to be able to enter what they want. It's hard enough to get them to enter the right genres.. forcing them to enter something new every month would fail. We get complaints on our Lyric/MP3 Mentor Critique from some who want to enter the same thing over and over. And that program isn't even about trying to "win" by having the best entry.. so imagine if it was? At some point, they have to please people enough to get them to use the site. The do, as far as I am aware, remove all the songs that finish in the bottom 50%. That's a sort of hint to consider something else. But I bet most that come back still enter the same old songs. It's like artists who play the same songs at every show year after year. I know artists who have played the same single song 5 straight years during our roadtrip visits. Many folks simply don't have newer material or they don't fell it is a good as their "hit." It's pointless to fight them on it. You can't change human nature.

As I said before how can many partial votes work?
If people do not get to judge certain songs ever but judge other songs multiple times then you have an unbalanced opinion.

But when you have 1.2 million cumulative voters in a month and they vote millions and millions of times, 1 person's opinion is only a tiny part of the overall picture anyway. If you want your opinion to be counted across the board, then vote on 100% of the battles. Otherwise, there is NO fix for what you are describing. People will never hear all the songs, yet their votes for other songs will count. That's simply reality. The system simple looks at what needs to be judged and hands out assignments in real time doing that. The fairest thing is to be sure that all the songs end up with as close to the same number of matches as the others as possible. Because there may be thousands of people judging a category simultaneously, it just plugs it in as it needs.

Ourstage has been the most reponsive company we've dealt with in dealing with feedback that I've ever seen. JPF members are listened to and I have spent a LOT of time advising changes and many of them have been incorporated. Some have not. In the end, a company has to make decisions that are best for them, not for each individual complainer out there. No system will ever make EVERYONE happy. If you ran it Jim, people would be unhappy with your choices. Daniel and his team have bent over backwards to make people happy, but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. There are also a lot of technology secrets involved that can't be discussed (including a lot of effort to detect and prevent vote cheating). Sometimes things are the way they are not because it will be popular, but because it makes other important things possible. And without those OTHER things, people would be far MORE unhappy.

So you know how they do things Jim. You've seen them react here and make changes suggested where they can. At some point you have to decide if it's worth your time or not. I think it's a great tool. I think there's FAR more good than bad going on with their system. I've seen people really benefit from using them. I've yet to see someone hurt by it. (And in the case of Cathy, I still say her complaint is with the people she PAID to enter (i.e. JLSC).. not Ourstage).

We'd both run any company very differently than the people who run it. We'd make different decisions and we'd change many things. Some changes would be better, some would be worse. But rest assured, ANY system we came up with would be trashed by SOMEONE. The fact that Ourstage responds to their users at all puts them light years ahead of most.

Brian