Jim,

Yeah,I have encounteredall of that. You would think, given this opportunity, that they would do at least a little bit of clean up before posting. And, how hard is it to cut 15 seconds of silence from the beginning.

The ones that really get me arewhen the vocalist or someone in the band takes 36 seconds to introduce the song...before we hear one single note!

Of course, all of that is professionally unbforgiveable errors of the artists, not OurStage. I think my overall biggest heartburn with OurStage has nothing to do with the judging per se. They just need to have more relavant genres/categoroies/channels. In Jazz, one of my most prolific genres, you will hear everything from, fusion to smooth jazz, to latin jazz to straightout jazz to beautiful vocals to cheap sounding lounge music to rap etc.

Perhaps a good analogy might be in the rock genre where you could have The Carpenters, ABBA, AC-DC, Grand Funk Railroad, Pink, The Stones and Maroon 5 competing against each other. They're really not very similar; but all are classified as one sub-genre of rock or another.

Other than that, I think that the judging is about as fair as we can expect. Take care Big Jim!

Al