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Yes, to tack on to what Andy said... Encouraging your own fans to vote in the last round is definitely important, considering how many people actually participate for that final 24 hours! At that point, all the music genres are pitted against each other; genre bias can play a huge role for listeners, because most people tend to lean towards the more "accessible" genres like Acoustic, Rock, Pop, etc. You may have noticed that Rap and Heavy Metal tracks tend to wind up at the very bottom of the finals rankings - even though they are the best of their channel and usually well made.
OurStage ran a contest back in March: artists who got the most new fans to join in the span of one week would get their music submitted to AOL for consideration. Well, Andrew and I both wound up on that list - but there were over a dozen people who recruited more fans than us, and still didn't place as high in the finals. So to summarize... having your own fan base can only help in those last 24 hours, but that alone may not be nearly enough if your track were not actually very good! (Luckily, most tracks *are* good in the finals. )
Asking fans to vote earlier on in the month - on the other hand - is basically pointless, because there are so many submissions in each channel; the chances are slim that your own song will come up. At least we can all be generally satisfied that the songs making it into the Top 20 deserve to be there.
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"When will we all, as artists, creators and facilitators learn that the so-called experts in our lives are nothing more than someone who has stepped forward and called themselves an expert?" –Brian Austin Whitney