Twisted as this may sound, I think it is this very uncertainty that makes the OurStage judging system probably the best yet devised. All those different people making their choices for all those different reasons... In the long run, each song gets several comparisons with other songs that have earned a particular rank...over time, everything gets jostled up and down for various reasons by the multitudes...and the ones that rise to the top have consistently outmatched other songs.

It ends up mirroring what makes ANY song popular to a general public. VARIOUS reasons. Sometimes production, sometimes the voice, sometimes the lyric...but in the end, the victors were chosen more often than the others. I think it works, and it's pretty hard to rig or bias a system like that.

http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman