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

Jill and I know a group of people that tried to cheat in the pre-quarter final rounds using some kind of a script system. They tried it two months in a row, as a matter of fact, and OurStage caught them both times. The cheaters were removed the first month, and the second month their songs had the illicit votes removed, sending them down to <250 in the rankings. So, I'm pretty sure OurStage has a handle on that kind of thing.

As for mass signups in the top 20/10, well, I don't really see what the problem is there. OurStage encourages you to ask your fans to vote. They want traffic, and after all, the site is supposed to be a complete democracy with votes drawn from "the fans" in general. My fans are certainly part of that population, and so are yours! Jill and I ask our fans to vote each month in the quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals, should we make it there, and there simply isn't anything wrong with that.

We always tell them to be honest and to NOT use downvoting or proxy accounts, for example, and through our efforts we have encouraged numerous artists to sign up for OurStage themselves AND vote in the pre-quarterfinals (not for us specifically, but for fun.) Some people have accused the site of being a popularity contest. So what? sgx put it best earlier in the thread. If he earned hundred of fans through years and years of hard work, he deserves the reward of encouraging those fans to support him in a contest like this.

Inevitably some people will say, "But the people with the most fans aren't necessarily the best musicians." Maybe so. However, fans are the best metric of finding good music, short of having an elite panel decide what's best. Not that there's anything wrong with that method at all, but it's the exact opposite of the point of OurStage.