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

In the finals, those top songs are the only game in town. It makes sense that you are in the spotlight then, and tons of fans are suddenly giving you another listen.

I think that's awesome.

Hi Tammy I agree with you on major flaws however I think you have missed the point re listens. The number of listens has nothing to do with judgements. It is the number of times people whilst not judging have decided to listen to your song. It stands to reason that the top twenty songs get a lot of attention during finals therefore more listens.

My conspiracy theory relates to that point. I believe that during finals people constantly check positions and vote tactically according to a song's position. They will vote favouring lower placed songs against songs they want to drop in position and then keep adjusting their votes accordingly preventing any one song climbing against their own.

To do this they must constantly keep looking at chart positions and this will register as a play.

Well I am no longer looking at this as a contest.
There have been 20 songs added to the Southern Rock Channel since this morning.
The 4 songs that I mentioned earlier are still in the last 5. That means all twenty of the new songs started out at a higher position. They already have an advantage. It is the tenth day of voting and those 4 songs have to play catch up to the songs that were entered today.
I don't see why a new song is entered ahead of songs that have been there for ten days.

How can a contest be fair when some songs are getting rotated in a dozen times and some songs none.

Maybe their algorithm is planned that way. I don't know anything about that stuff. If a song is favored more maybe it gets played more but as far as I can tell those four songs are not getting judged at all.

I think I am about done fooling with this site.
I'll try one more round of voting for a couple hours to see if I get the same results. If I do then I think I'll just leave my songs where they are and not participate any more.

I am not passing judgment on the site. This is just what I observed during the few hours of voting I did this morning.

I couldn't manipulate my song if I wanted to. It never came up for voting.

The only time it did was once yesterday and to test what I have been reading I decided to vote it better than the song it competed against. The good thing was it came up against the number one song and even though I did think the other song was darn good I still liked mine better. I voted for my song and The next time I checked my song was in last place, LOL.

I also ran into covers that were there yesterday. I reported them. They are still there. I assume you are only supposed to put covers in the cover channel. All other channels are for original music only. I might be wrong about that.

So lesson learned. Don't vote your own song better. you get penalized.

Bill I get the impression that you are not alone. I think Ourstage has some obvious problems that need fixing fast. We can only point these out and the rest is up to them.
They appear to be tinkering with irrelevant stuff or introducing gizmos and novelties outwith the competition rather than fixing the major problems. With more traffic these flaws will only get worse.

Perhaps we should ask Brian to get an official statement from Ourstage explaining what measures they are employing to fix the system to deal with our concerns and reassure us that these matters are being dealt with.

Hey Bill...

I made mention of that on the previous page. Every time I voted my song more favorable than the song it was paired with, my song lost ranking very drastically. Thanks for adding a note in support of that supposition.

I am trying to remain optomistic. I guess I'll continue to enter songs, but view it as only an opportunity to get listens rather than as a contest. If I should ever win anything, so much the better. I makes me inclined to not vote anymore because I feel that I cannot vote fairly without penalty. The one time that I voted the song paired with mine better than mine, my ranking remain generally the same. Every time, without exception, that I voted my song better, I took a big hot on ranking. A couple of insatnces could eb purely conicidental. EVERY TIME...I'm not so sure.

Alan

I just gotta ask because this seems so obvious to me. If the contest is for the month of June, why would they even allow songs to be entered after midnight of May 31? If I wanna put a team in a basketball tournament that starts on a Thursday, would they let me wait til Saturday to enter? Just skip over the first couple rounds of competition? I doubt it. Why not just have a cutoff on the last night of the month for entering songs for the following month?

Just my two cents worth
Eric

If you enter songs during the finals at any time, they won't enter in the top rankings.

Al
it may be coincidence but I don't think so.
My song was 66th out of 99 songs on the channel....After I voted my song better it dropped to 97th place. second from last.

I think they let people enter over the entire month until the finals start for practical business purposes. It's a free site. They are hoping to recoup to significant cost of running the site via advertising (and in truth, they keep that pretty low key in my opinion which is great). But without continual traffic and a lot of participation all month long, the traffic would be far less and any musician who found the site during the first 3/4ths of the month would likely be impatient to wait around until the start of the next month to see participation results. So they really need to keep it open at least most of the month to increase traffic and participation. Is it perfect? No. But it's reality. We accept music pretty much over the course of a whole year and people will still wait until the last second to enter. And even after that, we get hundreds of emails begging us to extend the deadline, no matter when it was set. Musicians are nothing if not procrastinators. But that fact doesn't help pay the bills when your site is run off advertising.

Ourstage has apparently added some new stuff including live chat. I haven't checked it out, but I am surprised none of you have mentioned it at all. Has anyone used it?

Brian

Bill,

I suspect it's coincidence. I know other people who vote for themselves and that hasn't happened. Since the majority of artists likely vote their songs better than everyone else (whether they admit it or not) a system that moved them all to the bottom would be pointless and it would also cause participants not to vote at all. And if they didn't want participants to vote, they'd either keep you from voting in the first place in genres you were entered in (which would be easy to do) or they'd set up the system so that your song never actually came up. They aren't doing either of those things, so I doubt what happened to you was by design. It would be counter productive to building traffic and participation.

Brian

This is the first time I heard of it.
OK I went and looked for live chat. Did not find it.
I don't think it matters much when a song gets entered. If you have a song entered you can leave it entered for the next month. If it has not done well this month it may do better the next.
What I don't get is why a new song does not go to the bottom of the pile and have to work its way up. They seem to enter it any where they please.

Where do I rank ? Nowhere now ! LOL. The song I entered did so badly in Soft Rock, I thought I'd put it out of it's misery. ( N0 331 out of 630 ) Time for a tactical withdrawl, a re-group ,a bit of a rethink and a good lie down !

cheers, niteshift

I've spent the morning judging in the folk channel, and I can't make heads or tails out of how the system works. Over the course of the morning, there were some songs came up 8-10 times and others only once. If a song isn't getting viewed for judging, how can it move on the charts? Doesn't seem fair.

Thanks for the heads-up on late entries, Brian. That does make sense since they're a free outfit. I do agree with Bill though that late entries should start on the bottom of the pile.

Eric

Eric
If you read my post on the previos page I describe 2 1/2 hours of judging in one channel.
I saw the same thing. Some songs come up 8 or 10 times and some song NEVER came up.
That channel only had 99 songs on it at the time I was doing the judging. I see no reason why some came up so often.
I have seen the same thing on other days of judging I just did not actually track them.

I had the same thing happen on a channel too. It was odd. The same girl came up over and over paired with someone different each time. I guess it is just part of the system perfect or not, that's the way it seems to be going.

Tammy

www.tammyedwards.com
www.myspace.com/tammyedwards2

Niteshift
Until they give us an accounting of how many times a song is judged I'd leave it there.
When I was tracking the songs I judged some got voted on often and some never came up.
I do not believe the current system is a good indicator of how good or bad your song is. It can't rise in the ranks if no body ever votes on it.
If they can show us how many times a song is played I see no reason they can't show us how many times it is judged.

Tammy

It may be very possible that someone else judging the same channel at the same time I did was seeing my song 10 times and not seeing the songs I was seeing.
I will give them the benefit of the doubt on that.
I am not slamming them at all, just making an observation.

I can kind of understand it when there are 1000 songs on a channel but the channel I was on had only 99 songs.

If and when they start showing us numbers on how many times a song is judged then we will know. Until then I will take a wait and see attitude.

Bill,

Seems like a business opportunity for OurStage. For $xx per year you get the "premium membership" option.

-- Full package of listening and judging statistics (including a listing of every judging event)
-- Front page splashes of your band/songs every once and awhile
-- Song critiques
-- and maybe pitch opportunities.

Of course, I would like the judging stats for free, but they are a business and gotta pay the bills.

Kevin

Not sure how to take that Kevin so I will take it tongue in cheek.

I would think a feature showing how many times a song is judged would be no more difficult than how many times a song is played.
They do advertise how unique and complex the judging algorithms are(whatever that means) I would think a stat showing how many times a song is judged would be child's play for them. They already track how many battles I have judged total and this month and how many entries viewed.
The one stat I do care about is not tracked

Anything that even hints at stats being deliberately hidden would be a problem for them as a business.
And they already have the front page rotation and featured bands
And I think pitch opportunities.

I for one would like to know if my song, and others, is even coming up in rotation because from what I have documented it is not.
If you are going to hold a competition everything should be open for inspection.
As far as the competition goes I don't really give a Frack how many times a fan listens to my song outside of the judging. It has nothing to do with it.

All I have been trying to do in my posts is to understand why some songs are being judged and some are not.
I am not the only person who is questioning it.
Some of the folks here are very tolerant of these sites and go out of their way to be optimistic about them and they are wondering the same ting.

Oh and they still have not removed the cover song violations I reported.

Exactly where did we get the information that the "Plays" count does NOT count the number of times the song was judged? Wasn't this only confirmed by one source, on these forums? Not to be rude or anything, but it's possible he got the information wrong. dannyjames has gotten some minor info wrong before, regarding the existence of a "Hide" feature in the OurStage profile.

It does not make sense to me that the number does not include # of times judged. The number rises almost exponentially during the final rounds. What is more likely; droves of new people are listening to the songs, or droves of people are VOTING on them? I've monitored my songs carefully, and some of them w/ low play counts have moved in their rank after getting a play. They don't move unless the play count also changes.

Andrew if the number includes times Judged that means my song has not been judged for two days.
And during a 2 1/2 hour session I was judging I saw some of the songs 10 times and the 4 I listed not at all.
Does that make sense?

Andrew,

Daniel has told me multiple times that the number does not include the judging stats, but only the number of times someone has requested the song outside of judging. To me, that is actually a valuable stat. If someone is forced to listen via the judging cycle, so what. But if I know folks are actually seeking my song out to listen to again or because they like my stuff or because they want to hear more of my work, that has some value.

The reason (and in this case, I am speculating) for not posting the judging totals is that in some genres, people are judging a LOT. Popular genres are likely getting a lot more votes/matches than less popular. If they showed the totals, people would start bitching when tiny genre X only had X number of votes to get in the finals or win while giant genre Y had a huge number of votes to get to the finals. Then we'd have people bitching about that. In addition, it would aid cheaters to know exactly how many times they needed to get their friends to vote bogusly to manipulate the results. In the end, their voting system is proprietary. They don't want to give competitors and others inside info on stats to figure out how they are doing what they do. That's smart business. In the JPF awards, we give out a lot of info, but there are pieces of how we do what we do that we don't reveal because frankly, I have 10 years of development put into getting through a half million songs effectively in an efficient way. I don't care to give away 100% of how we do it so that someone else (the Grammy's perhaps) can swoop in and take it, like they took our judging criteria ("Music that moves you") and used it for their broadcast several years running now like it was their idea and criteria.

Now, as I said, that is my speculation, but if it was me, that's what I would do. There's value knowing if folks want to hear your music when they aren't forced to. There's value to keep the natives from getting too restless when their small genre simply doesn't match up to the larger or more popular ones (and to be clear, just because a genre is huge in entries, doesn't mean it is popular in judging. I know that one of the largest gets some of the smallest numbers of voting because those that enter that genre don't seem interested in voting on it or getting their fans to do so). And I wouldn't really want to divulge every little secret to how the system works (like how I am tracking and dealing with cheaters which some have asked they reveal.. that would be stupid as it would teach cheaters what to avoid).

Gang.. it's a free tool. And it's a very effective tool and service outside of the "contest" portion of it. People are desperate to get folks to hear their music. Even in a worst case scenario, people ARE hearing your music (even if they are forced via judging) and I know when I judged I found a half dozen new artists I really liked and have since tracked to see what they are up to. And that is in the middle of our own awards process and in those cases, they aren't even JPF members.

I am rather amazed at the continual sniping on every little possible nit picking issue when these guys have been so supportive of JPF and our members concerns. How about we reverse the tone a bit on our helpful suggestions to go from bitching to supporting for a change? I am sure most of you intend only to help, but sometimes this type of help become a bummer. How about some of you dig in a little and check out their chat systems. Did you know you can have your own listening party there where the leader of the chats can play songs for all the folks in the room for feedback or as a release party etc? It's a live critique possibility I am thinking of using for JPF. Let's view this as a helpful partner for a while rather than something to complain or be suspicious about.

Brian

Brian
You are correct
It is a tool and to get the best use of it you must use it effectively.
But, without the Contest it is no different than any other site.
Everything that makes it great is tied to the contest.
I see your point in the cheaters being able to use the stats to try to manipulate the vote. But it seems they are already doing that anyway. All they have to do is look at the rankings.
I still think it would be very hard to cheat on this.

Like I said there is no way I could have manipulated the guy in last place. I NEVER got a chance to vote on the song. It never came up in, now, 4 hours of voting...BUT the songs on the first page....I saw every one of them numerous times.
The guy in last place could have ten thousand fans but it would not matter if they never get to vote on his song.

You can call it Nitpicking if you want but something isn't right. I know what I judged.
I can't devote 24 hours a day into voting, waiting for one song to come up, and I don't think many people can. An hour or two at the most but I am on here all the time. I doubt many FANS would spend much more time either.
I still don't understand how the guy in last place can compete with the guy in first place if the song never gets judged.

If you have an existing fan base that you can call on to vote for you, you will rise in the charts, if you are showing up in the judging. That makes sense.

So Fans of performing artists are the key...well that leaves me out of the competition. I am only a songwriter. This is not a song writer contest it is a performing artist contest.
I can live with that. No complaint at all. I am what I am.

I still have not found this Chat you keep referring too. Where is it?

Bill,

You're assuming that other voters are getting the same head to head contests you are. Someone else might find they have seen the song in last place many times. OR.. (and this is speculation only) you don't know that the song in last place isn't there for "other" reasons... i.e. violation of policy for example.

I voted 5000 times in a category and saw every song come up pretty much an equal number of times overall (I actually tracked over 400 songs on a yellow pad to see how it worked). BUT.. some songs would have times where it never came up.. then came up constantly. The system attempts to balance several things... when something was entered.. how it did relationship wise to other songs and how voters rank songs above and below it during the course of voting. I also know they've put in some addition voting mechanics to deal with some issues that I can't reveal. Also, in the near future, I believe we're going to see a really cool new update to the voting system which will REALLY address many of these issues in a way that is very smart. (Again, can't spill the beans yet).

The contest itself is only one relevant thing. (i.e. winning or losing). You need to see the bigger picture. Or not. In the end it's your time, your music and your career. Do what you want. But if I was still pursuing commercial music success, I'd have a lot of different ways to use this site to benefit me. Not the least of which is networking with like artists/writers. Heck, I'd contact all the top ranking ones and get to know them. I'd find some that might want to co-write or even some artists who might want to record one of my songs. These are your peers and the good ones are moving up in the world. Why not mix it up with them. The contest is a key part of this engine, but it's not the end all to the usefullness of the site.

As for the chat.. it's interesting folks don't know about it. I told Danny last week that I hadn't heard of it either. He claims to have sent emails out about it several times. I didn't get them. I wonder how many didn't? I'll bring it up again next time we talk.

Brian

Bill

The "chat" is called "Judges Chambers." Just click on the button that says Judges Chambers and it will put you in the chat room. You can even get there through the Ourstage Live window.

Eric

Brian
Glad to hear I am not the only one doesn't know about the Chat.

All anyone can do is report what they experience. I did that.

I am still in favor of this site and believe it will be a good tool.
Each of us has to figure out how it will best serve us, help us reach our goals, etc.
As a songwriter I am dependent on others for my commercial success. So networking is key.
Of course I have to write something worth networking first, LOL.

Brian, I love OurStage and I'm really glad that many people I know started participating after you asked me to look into it.

I still believe the "plays" count takes into account judging. I just did a little test. A song came up while I was judging in Electronic/Electro-Pop, called "We Are Many". Before playing it there, I loaded the song individually from the artist's page and clicked on it. It displayed 61 plays. I listened to about 20 seconds. Then I refreshed the page and clicked again. Still only 61 plays. I did this three more times, and the play count stayed at 61. Then I JUDGED the song, listening to some amount over 15 seconds (maybe 50 or so.) When I went back to the song page, it displayed 62 plays.

Just to be sure, I refreshed the page several more times, hitting "play" each time and waiting at least 15 seconds. But the play count never changed. I even tried waiting over 50 seconds after hitting "Play".

I don't think it counts repeated plays by the same person in a certain time frame. That way artists can't artificially make it look like they are getting huge plays. The Ourstage people use things like how many times something is favorited or played when deciding who to give performance slots to. So it's perfectly logical that it credited the 1 play you requested and that was it.

Brian

Remember that the number of plays are progressive from the time that the song was uploaded. It never recycles back to zero at the beginning of a new contest.
If your song was uploaded in February, it will show the number of plays since Feb. Ben

So, Andrew, if I understand it right the plays are registered for Judging? Not for simple plays?

The number one song in Southern Rock has been played(judged) 460 times in 6 days, number two song 366 times in 4 days, my song has been judged 51 times in 3 days.

OK

I still think it's separate plays. The tops songs would of course get more plays because people want to hear what is at the top. It would be stupid to exclude the separate plays... if anything Andrew's experiment showed that the play registered, rather than the vote.

Brian

I actually believe that songs that are more popular are judged more after a certain point. I believe the OurStage system gives all songs a fair shot for a certain amount of time, but as it becomes more clear which songs are more popular (say, 50th percentile and above) and which aren't, it will give more precedent to judging of the more popular songs. After all, while a song placing #400 vs #200 does not really affect the contest at all, a song placing #30 vs #10 makes an enormous difference, as the former position will not make it to the quarterfinals, while the latter one will.

Just theory, perhaps, but the way I've seen my own songs move around, as well as Jill's, over the last few months, I think this has some truth to it...

Either way, I don't have any problem here. Whether or not they show the plays from judging has no bearing on my very high opinion of the site itself, and I don't think it's wrong or right of them to do it whichever way they choose.

I know at one time they talked about increasing the voting for the songs at the top.. but I still think a lot of those plays for the top songs are simply because they ARE the top songs, and not directly a result of judging quantity... I often go in and listen to the top few songs in a given genre to see what is up there...

Brian

Well it's all a guess at this point.
It's still a good site.

How does Andrew's experiment prove anything. He played it and judged it and it increased 1 point. How can we know which moved it the play or the judging?

Well, my view is that I played it about four times, and the play count didn't increase. Then I judged it. Immediately after, the play count increased. Then, I played it four more times, and the play count didn't increase.

Well my song has held its position bouncing around the 25-27 mark for several days but in the last four hours it has dropped over twenty places. I find it hard to believe that so much voting against my song has take place in such a little space of time to alter its position so much. I also noted that a song which was in a similar position to mine for a similar length of time jumped up the order twenty odd places in the same short time. Something fishy is going on. The same thing happened with this guy's song last month.

I'm pretty sure Andrew is right about the play count tracking judging, not regular listens. When my song "Avalon" was in the Music Finals last month, it didn't make it into the top bunch until there were only a couple hours left to vote. And yet it had still gotten thousands of new plays, just like all the others there. It seems unlikely that those numbers could have been only for regular "listening", because most people visiting during that time are voting.

I've done a bit of "play" testing and noticed it takes about 5 - 10 minutes before it logs ordinary plays. Seems like I have to clear my cache and reload the page, then sometimes the results show even quicker. It's hard to know what happens while your voting, because you can vote all day long and your song never hardly comes up once, so it's easy to lose track as to how that impacts the play counts.

Here's the bottom line about these play counts:
It appears that Danny and Brian are saying it's only a fan play count, while some of you have experienced (maybe) a mix of fan plays and judging (voting) plays. Regardless, I think OurStage should clearly report what is what, and stick with that.

Example 1:
Song Preview Plays = 300 (from visitors & fans, etc.)
Contest Plays = 500 (from contest judging rounds)
Total Plays = 800 (for this song)

Example 2:
Song Preview Plays = 800 (from visitors & fans, etc.)
Contest Plays = 300 (from contest judging rounds)
Total Plays = 800 (for this song)

Note: The contest data (plays) could be made public or "hidden" by the artists. It would be great to know exactly how many times my songs got voted in any given channel throughout the month or at least by end of month. It's my own personal data which I can chose to share (or not share) with others.

If they simply did this, there would be NO more questions or confusion about where all our "plays" are coming from.

That's my vote!
Michael

Songs are getting thousands of plays? One of my songs got up to #13 and the most plays that it shows are 480. My other songs are all under 100.

Ben,

That's exactly why it would be stupid for Ourstage, in my opinion, to ever post judging totals. From genre to genre the totals are way different. It's not always based on the number of entries either. Some categories, including the small ones, get judged a lot, so categories, including the biggest ones, get judged very little. In fact, I think there are cases where the smaller the entries, the more judging takes place because when artists vote, they can get their own songs up far more often and thus stay with it longer.

Jim: It's easy to explain what happened to you. You know where people are whining about the same songs coming up over and over when they judge? Well.. if that happens to all songs at different times during voting, that means your song could finally have come up a lot of times in a row and didn't do so well. Other times songs suddenly move way up for the same reason. That seems like a pretty simple explanation to me.

I spoke with Danny again tonight about this. He's going to talk to the tech people once again to make sure exactly what people are seeing so we can solve this once and for all. But in the end, if I were him, I would NEVER show the number of times each song had been judged. It just opens the door for unhappy people to complain and also to give competitors more info than they need.

Brian

You think people might complain about OurStage?

Naaaa, no way. That could never happen.

Brian
If the thing is completely random then it stands to reason we would not see the same songs come up so many times and other songs not at all.
If the programming is as sophisticated as you say it is then I would think it a simple matter to prevent any song coming up more than once in any persons judging session.
I judged for 2 1/2 hours straight on one channel and saw the same songs coming up 8 or 10 times at least. Other songs not at all.
I have been watching the Southern Rock Channel for three days.
The songs in the last 5 positions have not moved yet there have been 45 new songs added. that means those song are being inserted at a higher rank than those last 5 songs.
If the new songs are being inserted in the first page or two a lot of people will see them.
Who goes to the bottom of the pile to listen to songs? Not very many people I suspect.
I find it hard to believe those last 5 songs have never had a positive vote. They might not be the best songs ever but they are a hell of a lot better than some I have heard that are ranked significantly higher.

One suggestion that songs that were "better" would get more voting opportunities is ridiculous. "better" in whose ears... Maybe today a bunch of folks would be voting that really like the song but never get a chance to vote for it because it never comes up?

I still like the site. I think it a good tool. But these problems need sorted out before people get turned off by it.

Brian I am not whining just applying logic. If the system is random then the results will be random and not a true reflection of mass opinion perhaps placements are down to just opinions of a few. Put another way if some songs get lots of judgements and then others get only a few this will not give an accurate picture of popularity. I also think that songs entered late on in the month can mess up any random program and the whole process. I have noticed that almost as soon as a song is entered it comes up a lot for judgements probably to allow it to play catchup. This must be unfair to songs that have been there a long time. I suspect that the system is too random and too complicated. Because of this a few flaws are occuring and not necessarily are the positions fair or accurate at any given time.

Brian,
I think it wouldn't be a problem as long as people could opt to display or hide the song plays feature. OurStage already has controls for all kinds of enable/disable options, and this way artists can see (for example) how many times their songs were actually played during the voting process for any given month. Theoretically, it would be the same for all artists (songs) in the same channel by end of each month.

For example, if you and I have a song in the New Age / World channel for June, by end of month we would both have gotten the same amount of rotations (judging plays) if we were in the same contest runs, the first 3 weeks, then the quarters for 4 days, the semi-finals for 2 days and the finals for 1 day.

It would be interesting for me to monitor how many vote/plays I've gotten in New Age channel as compared to another song in Instrumental or another channel, etc. It would give artists an idea of where the most voting is going on and which channels are the most active for any given month.

There's nothing wrong or bad about this, it's only the honest, truthful, transparent facts, and again, this info can be solely between OurStage and the artists who have entered songs into any given channel.

On the other hand, if I choose to display it (not hide it), then by end of each contest run all artists should have the same number of rotation/plays, right? The only thing that will vary is that some channels will have more plays then others, but that's to be expected because a channel with 1000 songs is likely to attract more voting/plays activity than a channel with only 100 songs, etc.

In this case I say... let the ARTISTS decide!

I had a few minutes to spare (hard to believe!), so I went to OurStage to do some judging. I intended to judge for about 15 - 20 minutes. There is a new (late) entry into the "Tropical" channel, where I have a song in the Top Ten.

This new song came up 17 times in a row! I am not exagerating...17 times in a row. I quite judging a that point. I'm guessing that this is a "catch up" function. If so, I do not think that is fair. If you come in late, you should get no special treatment for "catching up".

It is my opinion that after the 5th day of the month, the contests should be closed to entries...or, if they are allowed, they suffer the consequences af entering late, no "catching up" proveleges.

I am trying very, very hard to keep a positive and supportive attitude to OurStage because they support JPF. Although I've not abandoned them, it seems that continued support is getting more difficult for me. I truly hope that they will make a few changes that will allow me to continue their support. I always try to support JPF partners, when possible.

I have sent a couple of emails (contact us) to them in recent days but have not receicved a reply. I'll wait and see what happens.

Al I have only been looking at the Southern Rock Channel.
I did about an hour this morning. Many of the same songs I saw on my last judging session were coming up plus some new ones. I have a list of the 5 last place songs on that channel. I have yet to see them in 4 days. But the front runners keep coming up.
I don't understand how it all works but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt but if I don't see those last 5 place songs this month I think I'll be done with them. Those songs have not moved from their position in 4 days yet 50 new songs have been added. That just doesn't seem right too me.
But I am trying to stay positive about it

Hi Bill,

Daniel from OurStage here. Every song is judged but you're not guarenteed to get a song, even if you do lots of battles. They get distributed across lots of different judgers. That songs on the bottom stay on the bottom, are generally an indication of the fan preference. But you can't determine the judging fairness based only on the songs you are presented to judge.

Hi David,

That can happen but I agree 17 is a lot of times! We have a high volume of tickets right now so that's why you might not have heard back from us. We try to respond to everyone within 48 hours. Not always possible given the amount of email we receive. But its possible you will be presented with the same song multiple times if that's how the system distributes it. You won't be presented with the same pairings ever.

Not sure where the best place is to respond to the the Play Count question. Battle Views do not count as plays. Folks are already spending too much time trying to figure out what their rankings mean and why they are ranked where they are. That would only inspire more questing!

The system doesn't weight on popularity. The alogrithm is designed to ensure equality throughout the contest. I can only say that any individual judging experience has no barring oo the collective judging, which is to say, one persons "rotation" is not indicative of all rotations. Does that make sense?