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People are free to judge on any criteria they want. And you know what? That's true of all contests and awards. That's why we, from day 1, told our judges to vote on 1 criteria: Does it move you? We felt it was far more honest to allow judges to vote on what they love, rather than a set of criteria we might hand them because in the end, most will generally vote for their own criteria anyway which would lead to innaccurate results if a set of guidelines forced some to vote differently.

In my own case, if the vocals are horrible, it's going to be very difficult for me to give the song support unless it's up against another song with horrible vocals. In those cases, I often simply vote for a tie. If someone doesn't believe in their song enough to find someone who can at least sing in tune (or in the ballpark of in tune) then why should I care about it either? It would sort of be like a restaurant serving food on a steaming pile of dog crap and saying "we couldn't afford plates.. but the food is really really good." Ack. If you can't sing, lose the ego part and find a neighbor or relative or local singer who can't play an instrument or write a song who wants to get a recording of their voice to do your songs. If you don't, then don't be disappointed when you get no where. I've never believed in the lame story that industry folks will "hear past" a bad demo. Only people who want your money (or something else from you) tell you that anymore. There is simply too much music out there with great performances and great lyrics and great melodies to waste time on anything less today. It's time for a reality check for folks.

Granted, in the case of the JPF Awards we're not a "contest," so we're awarding a great song based on all factors that might appeal to a listener, not just technical or creative aspects alone. If you're forced to judge between 2 horrible songs and MUST pick one over the other, then I suppose a badly sung song could get the nod. We don't have that problem in our awards due to the amount of excellent stuff we receive. Excellent stuff, well recorded, well performed and well written gets eliminated so stuff less than that never really get in the mix.

An exception: If bad singing was by design to get an artistic point across (or part of the character of it all) and the creator was successful at making it work, it might still succeed. But the reality is bad vocals will nearly always result in losing to something better and it should. On the reverse, I could care less if a song is a full production or a single instrument or a cappella if it's reasonably in tune and gets the vision of the song across. There's a huge difference between a limited production done well and an elaborate one done poorly. We get full blown studio recordings here where people spent thousands of dollars but then had some horrific warbling over the top of them vocal wise.. those never get far.

As long as the song can be heard, the upload quality doesn't matter. Upload a low quality version of a Rolling Stones song and it will still sound fine. Upload a WAV file of a piece of crap and it will still be a piece of crap.

Brian