 Halloween Contest Feedback
The Halloween Song Contest turned out great! Thanks to everyone who participated!
I took some notes of things I think could be improved in the Halloween Song Contest so that the upcoming Christmas contest and future contests could turn out better. I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions.
I haven't figured out the best way to sort threads. Old posts stayed at the bottom.
I have quite a bit flexibility in regard to the way threads (song entries) are sorted. It seems that most of the early posters were pushed to the bottom of the list. Songs that were on page four received very little attention while songs that were consistently on the top page received dramatically more votes.
I haven't really figured out a fair way so that everyone gets the exposure they deserve. One way would be to start accepting submissions just a week before the contest end. I'm not sure.
Scores were very low.
I took a look at the ratings and while we all have different tastes, it seems strange that the winning songs had tons of “1 out of 5” ratings. I don't think I personally gave out a 1 out of 5 to anyone. Some of these were very well recorded and it just seemed very strange that so many people would give them a 1 out of 5 unless they were up do malicious behavior.
Problems with genres.
It seems that the music went into two totally different directions on the contest. There were quite a few “movie score style” pieces and there were quite a few songs on more of the pop/rock/metal side of the fence with a verse-chorus-verse type of structure. I found it difficult to compare the two.
I wonder if guys on the pop side were giving poor ratings to the songs on the instrument side simply because they were instrumentals.
There were many songs (usually instrumentals) that were really cool, but didn't strike me remotely as Halloween songs.
Maybe people just wanted to take part in the contest and used tunes they had already recorded. Maybe people were writing songs that just didn't happen to turn out as “Halloweenish” as they had intended. I'd like for more entrants in future song contests to hammer home the theme a little more. Maybe we can figure out some ways to make sure all the songs in the Christmas song contest are “Christmasy”.
What do you guys think? How can we improve the next song contest?
Brandon
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