Halloween Contest Feedback

[brandondrury]

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

[DT Chris]

The singlemost criteria of how I rated the songs were how Halloween-related they were.

[chris beaver]

firstly a huge thanks to Brandon for making these comps possible Ive never seen anyone from any forum put as much effort into their site as Brandon.

the online voting system is always going to be difficult to get right, here is a few suggestions to maybe improve the next voting system,

1, make who votes for what public so all can see

2, don't let anyone vote unless they make a comment in the thread about that song, so if someone votes 1 out of 5 or 5/5 they will have to say why,, this will help with any possible fraud votes and also give the poster of the song more feedback.

3, maybe have a pre selected set of judges of say 20 people instead of a anyone can vote,

i think its a shame that many many realy good songs had real low votes and while the idea of a anyone can vote online vote system is great, in realaty its never quite right for obious reasons.

what do you think?

congrats to the winners

[sensei]

I agree with Chris Beaver's suggestions 1 and 2. I'm on the fence about #3, and while I think it's a good way to set up a judging system, it's a little more difficult to figure out who gets is on that system...It is do-able though. I do think #1 is a great idea, kind of makes a sort of honor system I guess...and maybe to push it even further, not only show which one they voted on, but also what they rated it - and if they vote an extreme, 1/5 or 5/5 - have an option to explain! (his #2 point)

I also like Brandon's idea of possibly only letting submissions be posted 1 week in advance or something. This will possibly (hopefully) make it a bit easier, as early posts won't get pushed to the bottom. (Although I did find out finally you could sort them based on rating....although even then, some of the un-voted and low-vote songs are still on page 4...) - maybe get rid of pages and post it all on one big scrolling page...

I also found some songs hard to imagine Halloween songs. I know there are many "styles" of Halloween songs, just like any holiday songs - you get ones that sound Halloweenish (ie - scary, haunting...), and ones that are just fun and may just reflect it in the lyrics. It happens with Christmas songs too (although there tends to be many more Christmas songs with lyrics than instrumentals). I found some people seemed to just post songs that they had lying around, even if they weren't related at all to Halloween. I think allowing cover songs is a good idea. In one sense I would say make some rules/limitations, but on the other hand, I do like the freedom...

[Alimar]

Treat it like a real ballot. Genres set aside, musical tastes are TOO subjective. Remember, in actuality, only one song will win the BIG prize anyway. Why be able to vote for several songs? It simply tips the scales.

So, with fairness in mind:

Submissions are posted... lets say for one to two weeks (of a campaign). Then there would be "Election Day." The polls will be open for 24 hours (perhaps 12:00am CST to 11:59pm CST same day). Everyone should have heard the songs by the time the song submission deadline has arrived.

Then members vote AND comment. Not on a scale from 1 to 5. One "vote"... a simple vote. And only one! One member, one vote. Therefore there would be no low balling OR highballing... a simple vote cast... tallied... and a winner is declared. Like a real Democracy.

A member can only vote for their favorite song (like a candidate in a real election)... on "Election Day." The song with the most comments/votes... wins. The five runners-up can easily be sorted out.

Just a suggestion.

Alimar

[brandondrury]

This is all been GREAT advice. I want to thank all of your for your well thought out suggestions. I'll try to address all of these ideas here.

1, make who votes for what public so all can see

2, don't let anyone vote unless they make a comment in the thread about that song, so if someone votes 1 out of 5 or 5/5 they will have to say why,, this will help with any possible fraud votes and also give the poster of the song more feedback.

I like both of these ideas. I'm all for personal accountability, and I do think that we should all discuss the songs that we rate or vote for.

Unfortunately, both of these would require me to pull out the PHP code and write some mods or pay to have them done. That opens up a pandora's box of cost, time, and who knows what. In an ideal situation, I would use the built in features of this forum script to handle the contest.

When you put it down on paper, is it worth $500 for me to pay someone to write a mod or worth 80 hours of my time to incrementally improve the contest? It's hard to say. With a little thought, I may be able to utilize the current forum without modication.

3, maybe have a pre selected set of judges of say 20 people instead of a anyone can vote,

I have to admit that there was a song that on Halloween day that I was my personal favorite but it's rating was low enough for me to raise my eyebrows and wonder if some tampering had been done. A part of me wanted to use my 10 test accounts I have here at RecordingReview.com to jack the score up to what I thought it deserved. I thought about this for about 5 seconds and decided that I do not want a "big brother" / "powers that be" mettling in the natural order of things.

As much as malicious tampering (if it existed at all) bothered me, I couldn't get myself to add my own not-so-malicious tampering to counteract it. (This is consistent with my own political / economic views.)

i think its a shame that many many realy good songs had real low votes and while the idea of a anyone can vote online vote system is great, in realaty its never quite right for obious reasons.

I'd love to think that we have a fun, happy community here where everyone takes 2-40hours and wastes it on making a recording for the contest in the spirit of having a good time. People asked me what I would do if I had won the contest and I have to admit that winning never even occured to me. To me, winning was actually writing, tracking, and mixing the song!!!

With that said, I did get outside sponsorship for the contest in an effort to give people motivation to enter. If people are motivated to enter, some people will have motivation to do "whatever it takes" to win.

Why be able to vote for several songs? It simply tips the scales.

You are right, but there are some ramifications from this "one vote" concept when it comes to the actual use and "fun" of the contest.

1) If I can only choose one song, I feel that I'd have to listen to them all, try to somehow remember which song was which. Take notes. Etc. It would be a dramatic pain in the ass for me, personally, as an active dude on the site to come up with that one single vote.

2) It seems that this may be a good way of doing it if the selection was narrowed down to 10 songs or something. With 80 songs, few people are going to listen to them all. It's also possible that this one vote could just as easily be cast for the "wrong reasons" as well.

Submissions are posted... lets say for one to two weeks (of a campaign). Then there would be "Election Day."

This isn't a bad idea at all!! I like it. It's essentially what I did although I had 2-3 election days simply because of the hours it takes to listen to 80+ songs. I do agree with this concept.


It sounds like I need to put some thought into this before I launch the big Christmas song contest.

Brandon

[Phlipper]

I think a lot of these problems will arise down to the "get your friends to vote" bit - I know that some of my workmates doled out 1's to people that definitely did not deserve them - the general public will always behave this way when they see the issue as one of loyalty. I know that a few of my friends who are into recording themselves joined up and voted, but not as many as those who have no idea/interest about recording.
The truth is, voting up a track based on this loyalty is just a bad as voting down the others.
It's a pain in the butt, but I think it's something that's always going to play on you, i.e. the more members you have, the more clout your forum will achieve (and it definitely deserves MAXIMUM influence).
So, maybe another idea would be to only allow voting to members who have been here over a certain period of time (once again, though, I'm sure that this would take a bit of investment to create another level of member).
I think that the whole competition thing is one of them things that you can keep looking at until it drove you insane if you're not careful
A lot of the form that the contests can take will be down to the available prizes, I suppose. You could run sections that split amateurs from pro studios etc. until your blue in the face if you have the available prizes!
It does seem shameful that no song was left with a score that was graded above even average! For my part, I know that at least a couple of my friends behaved with misplaced loyalty... after the fact it is too late, I know, but I tried to counter that by asking others after them to just vote for my song.
I also think, to anyone that's not into recording, the term 'song' becomes a factor (after speaking to some of my friends - they viewed the soundtrack type stuff as 'not songs'). I'm not sure what could best be done about this - I guess the time period thing would, again, counteract this to some degree.

[Phlipper]

...or of course, you could open the whole thing up like 'X Factor' (over here, American Idol over with you) so that entrants had a chance to say:
1. Who has died recently that makes the track so special
2. Their terrible upbringing that means they are battling against the odds

... and a whole host of other things that have no place in songwriting contest!

[sensei]

What if you split the contest up into 2 categories? Pieces with lyrics, and pieces without lyrics. That would settle the issue (at least somewhat) of some people not enjoying the instrumental tracks and others not enjoying the songs with lyrics. Of course, then you would probably need to have 2 grand prizes and double the amount of runner-ups, but you could always make the runner ups smaller (2 or 3 for each category)...

[markiegiscool]

Originally Posted by Phlipper

...or of course, you could open the whole thing up like 'X Factor' (over here, American Idol over with you) so that entrants had a chance to say:
1. Who has died recently that makes the track so special
2. Their terrible upbringing that means they are battling against the odds

... and a whole host of other things that have no place in songwriting contest!

Do you listen to Chris Moyles? He constanly makes fun of this.

"It was only when both of his hands got torn off by a rabid dog that Mark decided enough was enough - He was going to learn the piano, and play as a tribute to all people with no hands. Let's see what the judges think of his Halloween song..."