JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Brian, a suggestion...

Guys,

We have had 8 Awards cycles. The largest in 2009 had 560K songs entered from 185 countries and over 10K judges helped us do it. Our last Awards was in 2020. We still had a good amount of music, 230K songs and 17.7K albums. Then Covid hit and the world changed. It has not returned. Venues closed. We used to do 200+ live events a year in 100+ different cities. We even had meet ups for message board users because the community was active enough to have dinners and shows and workshops just among active users here in a lot of cities. This was mostly all before YouTube, Instagram, Tik Toc and Facebook became the norms.

For us to even consider having a "contest" even just a monthly "message board" version, it would have to be a large enough entry pool to justify doing it. I also do not want to equate a contest with a handful of entries against our history of 100 Genres for both albums and Songs and our smallest Awards, was the first in the 1997-2000 cycle, which still included over 1100 albums and 14K songs entered. To measure up to what it took to received recognition in those, we'd need at least a few hundred entries to justify it and we are just not there.

Additionally, if the quality of entries wasn't there in a genre, we didn't have the genre. As we grew we used to require a minimum of 100 Albums submitted within a specific genre, (and we'd find the songs within that genre from those alums as well as other genres where someone had a deserving song within the parameters of that genre. If we do the awards again, I likely would not consider it viable without at least 10K albums submitted. From that, we'd figure out how many song and album genres we could have. Year one we had something like 17 genres, give or take (without looking it up). That means we had at least solid entries to fill 20 deserving nominees in each of those genres. Even back then, about 40% of the music was eliminated in round 1, the it continued to get whittled down until we stopped with at least 16 nominees plus ties (songs within the margin of 5 votes). Unlike the industry the point was to promote worthy music and boost artists careers. Those nominations meant a LOT, in large part because we had plenty of well known names in every cycle competing including people already famous, already with hit songs, already winners of Grammys (or nominated) as well as Emmys, Oscars and pretty much every other music award and contest that existed. But ours in 2009 was the largest music awards of ANY kind ever conducted. And we did it all 100% for FREE! You simply had to use a real name, address and contact info to enter (wand we never used those contacts for any purpose except to send out awards after we finished, and to simply do our best to be sure people entered in their own name. Before final nominations came out, we verified that those folks were real. I don't believe we ever had a single "anonymous" entrant, though there was 1 nominee we could never find, which isn't bad with 10s of thousands of nominees over the years.

All that to say, if you collectively can wrangle even 100 people to enter, I would consider doing something, but it would be clearly not connected to the official awards programs of the past. And frankly, if the quality of entries can't produce at least 20 worthy of recognition nominees, it would be the last time we did it on a small scale. It takes a LOT of entries to find enough quality most of the time.

I will say, if we do a large awards again, I would have an A.I. "Genre" because in 20 years, 99% of music on a mass consumption level, will be made using A.I. throughout. The technology is already pretty amazing if you know what you are doing. I have been uploading old songwriting sessions where we didn't finish the entire song, and using A.I. to learn how we sounds, then to extend essentially OUR playing to a finished song. It's a struggle that keeps getting better almost by the day. I haven't heard any of the A.I. tracks by any of you, but if they are sounding as good as the results I am getting, I bet there are some bangers.