We're about 20 days into the month of April, which means that the Audio Overdrive event is going to end in 10 days. The master plan was to give out $25 of the $40 in prizes to the top 25 songs of the month, and the remaining $15 to random runners-up. As you may have noticed, we have a slight problem:

There have only been eight new songs in the last 20 days.

I have two major concerns regarding this (lack of) turn of events: Did we not advertise the event enough, and Where does this leave the contest itself?

At the moment, the only major contributor to the site with any real pull over a large crowd is DJtheS - hell, I'm going to outright state that he's the site's biggest lifeline. So why didn't he make a video promoting the event? Actually, he did. He posted about it in a video called "Justice 4 All - Voting Period" as you probably know by now. So, everyone that was going to vote would also learn about the contest, right? Yeah, about that...

People on the internet tend to be impatient. I'll even admit it myself - I'll check my E-Mail 20 times in one day waiting for a reply from someone. When YouTubers check their subscription box, they're going to see the video is called "Justice 4 All - Voting Period", they're going to think "Oh, time to go vote for someone else's songs", and they won't bother watching the video. Had the video title had the words "& Audio Overdrive contest" tacked on to the end of it, it would have sparked some interest in at least some of DJ-S' subscribers.

Yes, I'm criticizing the sites biggest lifeline for not adding three and a half words to a video title. Yes, I'm treading on extremely thin ice. Yes, I'm completely insane.

"But Shredster!" you say while making the following perfectly logical observation: "There's an ad for the contest right on the front page!"
I understand why you'd want to call me crazy if I told you that it's entirely possible to miss that. Allow me to explain:

I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which means after factoring in the omnipresent start menu and internet browser toolbar, I should be able to see about 1100 pixels or so down from the top of the webpage. HERE is a visual example. So anyone with a 1200-pixel-tall monitor should be able to see that image with perfect clarity. Here's the thing though: 1200x monitors are extremely expensive; a good chunk of them cost over $300 bucks. I'm guessing that less than 50% of all incoming traffic is going to have such a huge monitor.

So lets say you have a smaller monitor. 1280x1024 was the standard up until a few years ago, and is still a fairly common resolution. HERE is an example of a 1000-pixel-tall monitor. As you can see, only the 10th or so of the Audio Overdrive banner is visible. Admittedly, this one's my fault for focusing the brunt of the banner's "attention-grabbyness" towards the bottom-center of the image - I jumped to the conclusion it'd be at the top of the page rather than towards the middle, and designed the banner as such. Whoops.

But there's still that line of text that says "Remixsquared's Audio Overdrive", right? Notice how that text is is a shade of grey similar to the grey that fills out the empty space to the left and right of the page. The color grey is extremely common on the site, and is easily overshadowed by the color-and-image-tastic "Top 10 Songs of the Day".

Finally, a good chunk of the people visiting the site are likely using laptops and\or notebooks, many of which have even smaller resolutions than 1024x. Many modern laptops can get as small as 1280x720, and when your screen resolution is 720x, combined with the aforementioned toolbar and start menu, well, you can tell where this is going. (For those of you that didn't follow the link, the Audio Overdrive banner is completely pushed off the bottom of the screen.)

One last issue I'd like to cover regarding the lack of submissions is whether or not we jumped the gun entirely. Even with DJtheS bringing in 5,000+ subscribers (which is a hell of a lot, mind you), we don't have a very good idea of how many of those subscribers are remixers themselves. I'm not suggesting that we start pestering other prominent YouTube remixers to start posting to our site - that could easily come across as desperate or immature. I'm saying that the rest of us should try promoting the site in our own ways as well! Whether it be through Youtube, Fan Games, other music making sites, or wherever else posting about a video game remix site would be acceptable.

Moving on to what to do with the current contest, unless a long-time remixer discovers the site and decides to upload his entire collection within the next 10 days, we're going to have a lot of leftover prize money. What happens to this money is ultimately up to Quintin since he runs the place. I just want to make a couple of suggestions. First off, I'd try offering the few new posters the money they would have won anyways. I also urge Quint to keep the leftovers for if we ever try a second Audio Overdrive.

EDIT: This actually ties into something else that's been worrying me about the site; we're basically paying people to fill the website with content. I'm not sure how everyone else interprets it, but the way I see it, that's now how fan-work websites are supposed to operate! IIRC, we want to paint RemixSquared as a website where a user can upload their remixes, fan-concepts, and original game loops(?), get constructive feedback for their works, and socialize with other remixers new and experienced (while NOT getting trolled into oblivion, preferably). Quintin even stated at some point that some of the guys at OCRemix really liked the idea of being able to plop a mini music player containing their songs right into their forum posts. If we could come up with more features like that, that would help paint the site as the kind of place you'd want to post music to for reasons other than just "because money".

And before you ask, YES I only know the site exists because of the Final Destination contest. I originally wasn't going to enter until DJtheS mentioned something about there not being enough entries to the contest - the whole 'cash prize' hook wasn't enough to interest me.
END EDIT

Anyways, that's the end of my rather negative text wall. I really want to hear everyone else's thoughts on the matter. Any and all ideas are welcome, even the seemingly stupid ones - genius and stupidity are often mistaken for each other.

TL;DR: Yeah, good luck with a laconic version of all that.

This is a long post, so I want to make sure to reply to all of the points.

First, in regards to the money, it is vitally important that those who posted songs earn it. Internet conspiracy theories are common, and people need to be paid out as promised. The money will be spent with my portion coming out first, and then Shredster's coming out in the end. If there are not enough submissions to earn all of the money, then whatever is left over will be returned to Shredster, since he went above and beyond in his support for this contest and contributed when he didn't have to.

As to advertising, it is possible that people are not scrolling down the front page enough to see the banner. For the rest of the month, I'll switch the placement of the banner and the top songs. I'm not sure about this one simply because the site is supposed to be about music, and taking the music off the prime location on the front page in exchange for a large ad might turn away some people. But since it was suggested, I'll try it.

If this Audio Overdrive fails, then I don't think a second one should be tried. I think that the idea will have been proven to not work. Instead, we should either host another contest, or not spend any money at all for a while and either try a new idea or make some site changes that you think might pull in more visitors.

I've tried posting at many forums. At one point, I made a post to the Overclocked ReMix forums suggesting that they simply add a BBcode tag to their forums that allows people to embed songs uploaded here into their forums. That blew up into a huge controversy where their administrators accused me of trying to make money by stealing music and on and on and on. There were so many lies that I never actually was able to post all the evidence to disprove them, and I left. That's where the financial balance sheet came from, for example.

My interpretation of video game remixes is this: there are a large number of remixes out there, probably over a hundred per day being posted to places like YouTube, where most have nobody listening to them. Overclocked ReMix, the largest site, operates using a judges' panel, which rejects the vast majority of music being submitted.

The people who need to be targeted are the common people (not the administrators and judges) who visit the Overclocked ReMix forums and post works in progress. They don't care about politics and just want to share and listen to music. But we can't post in his forums because Djpretzel has locked threads related to this site and others. Perhaps private messages to some people who post music on the forums might be a way to present our site to them without needing to make any public posts.

The message above sounds like it is written in despair, but I disagree. Viewership has continued to increase significantly to its highest levels ever. There were twice as many people who visited the site in March than did in February. This site may only have reached 0.5% of its potential audience, but it is still the second most popular site by far. I believe that many artists would choose this site over the others if we were somehow able to contact them, because the other sites have not innovated in years.

My thing about the overdrive is that I don't think there are enough active registered people that have enough songs to post to something.

In addition, the contest of that nature requires a boatload of people in order for it to actually be of success. Just because it fails now doesn't mean you should disabandon the idea ever again. It's just atm, it doesn't seem that useful since there aren't enough people with enough songs for it.

I'm not sure why the site is not getting enough exposure to compel a user to register. Sure having increased views is good, but if you're not getting any registered users proportional to the increased viewership you're getting, then it's just lost visitors IMO.

For an average Internet user like me, as Shredster pointed out nicely, I'm rather lazy and impatient when it comes to doing things. Case in point: Registering at a site/forums, having to fill so much info in. Maybe allow an alternate way of registering (say, facebook integration/gmail/yahoo integration) that makes the process easier to register.

Also, I noticed in one particular forum a couple of people didn't want to vote in the compo because they had to "actually register to do so", and while I see why they don't want to register because of this, I also see something like this being a detriment to the site.

Additionally, if there can be alternate methods for voting in a compo, that would be good :)

Also, it would be convenient if a new visitor were automatically categorized as a "guest" with limited rights such as voting (by logging in as a "guest" or something like that).

There's only so much that can be done...After all, OCRemix is the most popular site for VGM Remixes. You're kind of restricting yourself to an audience of which OCR has a monopoly over, so to speak.
I don't think it would hurt to try expanding remixsquared to be a little bit more than just music focused on VGM.

I'm interested in hearing what Shredster says, but I'm not sure that we should expand the site to non-videogame music. That would dilute its appeal to people who like videogame music, and there are many other sites that allow posting of general music.

If facebook registration is deemed important, I can implement that in a weekend should everyone agree. But I also think that it's important to look at the reasons why people might not be registering. If they are refusing to register because they think that there are too many fields, then even if they completed registration, they are unlikely to participate anyway. Increasing the number of registrations isn't useful if nobody uses their accounts to post songs. Since posting a song takes far longer than registering, registration length may not be affecting people who would actually post songs.

Overclocked ReMix and this site offer vastly different experiences. At Overclocked ReMix, the community is centrally controlled, like a clique. If you are not good enough to get your music accepted, then there is a hierarchy where you are less welcome than composers in the "official canon."

What I believe is that, if both sites started out with zero visitors, then the equality offered here would be preferred by most people over Overclocked ReMix's method of self-selected judges. My belief is that the only reason that Overclocked ReMix is successful is simply because there was no alternative until now. I'd like your opinion on whether you agree with that statement or not. If it is true, then all that we need to do is get the normal visitors of Overclocked ReMix to be made aware of alternatives, and people will choose this as the better one. If people do not prefer community voting over judges, then you could argue that it is not worth continuing at all - because I simply don't want to be part of a place where people feel that they are more qualified than other fans to judge music.

quintin3265 wrote:

I'm interested in hearing what Shredster says, but I'm not sure that we should expand the site to non-videogame music. That would dilute its appeal to people who like videogame music, and there are many other sites that allow posting of general music.

If facebook registration is deemed important, I can implement that in a weekend should everyone agree. But I also think that it's important to look at the reasons why people might not be registering. If they are refusing to register because they think that there are too many fields, then even if they completed registration, they are unlikely to participate anyway. Increasing the number of registrations isn't useful if nobody uses their accounts to post songs. Since posting a song takes far longer than registering, registration length may not be affecting people who would actually post songs.

Overclocked ReMix and this site offer vastly different experiences. At Overclocked ReMix, the community is centrally controlled, like a clique. If you are not good enough to get your music accepted, then there is a hierarchy where you are less welcome than composers in the "official canon."

What I believe is that, if both sites started out with zero visitors, then the equality offered here would be preferred by most people over Overclocked ReMix's method of self-selected judges. My belief is that the only reason that Overclocked ReMix is successful is simply because there was no alternative until now. I'd like your opinion on whether you agree with that statement or not. If it is true, then all that we need to do is get the normal visitors of Overclocked ReMix to be made aware of alternatives, and people will choose this as the better one. If people do not prefer community voting over judges, then you could argue that it is not worth continuing at all - because I simply don't want to be part of a place where people feel that they are more qualified than other fans to judge music.

-Oh I know you guys probably don't want that expansion. Just an idea to separate yourselves from being considered a "OCR clone".

-You have to consider that there are more regular users that does not produce any type of music then there are users who do produce music. While you have given a bunch of tools to help artists post their music and promote themselves here (effectively ALOT of incentives), I don't see any particular incentive for regular folks to want to come here, stay, and participate. It seems to me that the emphasis of the "audience" is on fellow musicians, and that regular users that don't produce music are "secondary".

-I know what you mean about OCR. I've never been to that community myself (only to hear a couple of songs), and I've only heard negative things regarding the submission process.

-I believe if you started out with zero visitors, then I'm confident you guys would be the top choice for sure. The only issue is, that's not the reality of the situation :lol:.
As for it being simply because there was no alternative until now, I can agree with you, to an extent. I would say there was no *viable* alternative until now. OCR is pretty popular now because it is an established community, SO established, even Capcom worked with OCR members to produce tunes for their Street Fighter 2 HD remix on XBLA. People who dig VGM and artists that capitalize on this particular area look to OCR because they are quote "credible".
And, even though the panel voting is not a popular method of "voting" for the best song in whatever process (be it a competition, just regular submission, etc.), the quality of music content can at least be controlled to some extent. You can't necessarily say the same thing about community voting, where there could be unfactored biases occurring (be it voting for a particular song in a competition because it's the most popular VGM track of a game in general, even though the remix may not be good at all for example).
Still, having choices is always a good thing.

As for making normal visitors be aware of alternatives, yeah, I don't see a problem with that. But you said you got banned trying to do that, so there needs to be another way to tackle the issue (the best way that I found out about this site was thanks to DJtheS posting about the current remix competition at Court-Records, a dedicated Ace Attorney fansite).


Here's what I'm thinking...People like DJtheS and Shredster seem to be musician representatives of R^2. If you can attract a couple of more "permanent" musicians to help grow this site, then I'm thinking you can partner up with a bunch of indie game developers, or Youtube stars(such as the RPGMaker community itself, or NicePeter/EpicLLoyd of the Epic Rap Battles of History, who uses music made by indie artists for their rap battles...Just an example), who need musicians to produce music for them. I'm not sure if OCR has ever went to this route before, but I'm sure you guys can establish a footing since there's various songs tributed to all sorts of games on this site you know?


For example, the VAA (Voice Acting Alliance group) is entirely based on voice acting, and many of their members contribute voices for many indie projects:
http://voiceactingalliance.com/board/forum.php

But notice how their forums include many different sections *not* related to voice acting? This provides incentives for other users whose sole focus is not based on Voice Acting in general. Sure you have an off-topic section, but to an average user like me, that just sounds boring and vague :P

They've been established for years but that place somehow is always still insanely active haha.


Also, it'd be cool if the most popular/best artists of R^2 comes out and makes some sort of collaborative album/EP, and "release" it for free to all sorts of sites (reddit, piratebay, hell even iTunes if possible). People love free stuff after all. Advertise the site in the forum descriptions and all.

With the Audio Overdrive, you could collect all the best songs and release it as an album (with artists' permissions of course) for that particular month of competition. The possibilities are endless...Though obviously, this requires alot participation of the music producers here.

You know those themed competitions right? Right now it's Ace Attorney. Well grab the best Ace Attorney tracks of the competition and release THAT as an album to all of the dedicated fansites to AA. People are bound to take interest in the site if you're someone taking the lengths to put that much effort into this.

I may be going on a tangent, but that's what I have so far haha

-The site already offers an entire "RemixSquared Originals" sub-facet that allows users to post original game songs and\or fan concepts, such as Franzen's old library of original game music. This level of freedom that R^2 gives it's submitters is something that OCR would likely scream in horror at.

-After visiting OCR for myself, I can already see that R^2 is far more noob-friendly. R^2's search engine already makes it easier to find the exact remix you're looking for (I.E. "Cave Story Drum & Bass" or "Tetris Orchestral") provided someone has uploaded a song that matches those parameters. When I tried to explore OCR's collection, I felt like I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get to "Sonic Adventure" only to find that all of OCR's Sonic Adventure collection is rather terrible. Plus, I think that OCR's judges are biased towards electronic music. Being something of a soft Metal fan myself, you can see why I'd think this is a problem.

-Related to the point above, I think another glaring issue is the recent change in video game data providers. When the site became Whiskey (GiantBomb) Powered, all existing song data was totally erased from the site. If Quint still has some of this old data, I suggest we try to thumb through it and see how many songs we can re-associate with their respective games and genres.

-It sounds like that winning over the OCR crowd, at least for the time being, is going to be impossible. For now, we should probably focus our efforts on (to put it harshly) OCR "rejects" and remixers who actually care about constructive feedback. I'm not exactly in the loop when it comes to this kind of thing, however, so I'm stumped as to how we'd go about this.

-As far as attracting more permanent remixers goes, we'd need to convince remixers who would have posted their works on YouTube or Newgrounds or the like regardless. NicoCW, for an example, has been posting both Classic Sonic-style remixes and his original "Steve RPG" soundtrack for quite some time now, but has always hosted his downloads on MediaFire. He has about 3,000 subscribers, so approaching him about posting to R^2 could be difficult, but if we somehow could convince him to upload here, the site would be a perfect fit for his purposes. This is just one example, of course.

-I've considered the idea of a R^2 collaboration album in the past myself, but I could never come up with a workable structure to decide what songs\artists were included. I doubt we could just use the winners from all of DJtheS's contests, otherwise it'd end up being "ElectricMudkip: The Album". :lol: With permission from other R^2 users, I could probably cobble together a sort of RemixSquared 'trailer' that features snippets from some of the site's best (and worst?) songs, and we could just post that to sites like Reddit or fan-sites like MFGG.

-Adding some kind of sub-feature to RemixSquared where indie or fan game makers can work with remixers to create soundtracks for their games sounds like an excellent idea. I could create a new section of the R^2 forums dedicated to indie game and fangame soundtracks, with appropriate "requests" and "released" subforums. What do you guys think?

Huddini wrote:

Here's what I'm thinking...People like DJtheS and Shredster seem to be musician representatives of R^2.

I'm flattered that you'd compare me to DJ-S, I really am, but you overestimate me. The only places I'm well-known at are fairly small and likely don't have any other musicians in them. This MIGHT change once I've released my Smash Brothers de-make, but that's going to take all summer to finish. (Hey, it's not like New York was built in a day...)

These are very long posts, and I would love to reply to them in full, but being a Monday, I have limited time available. That said, there are some important points here that deserve immediate attention and I plan to come back to the rest later.

First, to clarify the relationship with overclocked remix: I was never banned from their forums; I just stopped posting there because djpretzel replied to my posts with criticism and personal attacks, and he locked threads so that I could not reply. Then he followed me to another forum and continued to gin up trouble about something else. That's one reason why I'm not inclined to make posts in other forums, because I don't want him to show up and start another thread where the truth becomes irrelevant. The other reason is that I need to concentrate on making the site better, as posting in forums will take up all my time and there will be no improvements.

Therefore, I would love if someone else was willing to spread the word. I don't think public forum posts at any forum are the answer. Instead, someone who is willing should go to overclocked remix as well as other forums, look for posts where artists are trying to get feedback for their works in progress, and send them a private message suggesting they post here. That way, the forum administrators don't need to be concerned with spam and we only contact those who are likely to join.

I do not like the idea of an official album. Overclocked ReMix does those, and that's one of the reasons they are a clique. The same artists are included on every album. However, we could add a field that declares an album as "finished," which the album coordinator can set. "Finished" albums can then be released on an RSS feed, and be distributed in E-Mails and press releases. They would not be "official" albums and anyone could post one, keeping the idea of equality. And while many artists may disapprove of these sites, what.cd is actually a very good place to get people to download such albums because they allow free albums to be posted with no distinction in appearance between them and commercial albums. You can put an album under Nobuo Uematsu and people with subscriptions to his albums will automatically download it, even if it is a remix album. All of OCR's albums have been posted there and have significant numbers of downloads.

As to the "OCR rejects" crowd, that's who I was referring to. I would expand that definition to "anyone outside the judges panel and their core clique of friends," so that some people who are accepted could also be targeted.

What we can do right now, without needing anyone else's help, is to get all of the old songs properly categorized. I agree with Shredster that that is important, but it will take up to 10 minutes per song, or as many as 25 hours. We need to listen to each song, tag it, determine which game it's from, and then do that for the next song. I can produce the list of VGMdb games and track names for each song, but since the reason for eliminating the VGMdb was, among other things, to make categorization more accurate, that data would be only useful as an initial reference to narrow down the search.

If we can get games on the songs, then normal people are more likely to find what they are looking for when searching, they will stay longer to look at other songs, and search engines will add those terms as keywords. Is anyone willing to assist with this categorization?

If I'm doing the math right, that means there's about 150 songs. That's actually not too bad.
I've got the summer off from college, so I can browse through the list for an hour-or-so a night during then. Factoring in days where I'm otherwise occupied, I could probably go through the list within 40-50 days. My primary fields of video game knowledge include the main Mario, Kirby, and Sonic series as well as some random GBA games and a few older titles like GEX or Re-Volt. Games like the PS3 Ratchet & Clank games or anything from Capcom are out of my reach, though.

I'm not sure the song listings are even that complicated. In general, the ones that are associated with games are done so correctly, so you don't have to have game knowledge. The difficult part will be the tagging, because you have to listen to each song and then associate it with tags.

This is something that would be best handled by one person. That person will develop a rythym over time that will allow him or her to knock out songs more quickly. Even more importantly, the tags that are actually selected will be consistent and used often, which makes finding similar songs easier.

In addition to the "finished" albums button, I also think that a "tag lister" is a good thing to add to the search page. Currently, the only way to see if tags exist is to type the first letter of the tag. If there were some sort of selector, then the suggestions might jog people's minds. Tomorrow, I will be creating a list of features for development during the weekend that I will request comment on.

Finally, I reread the posts above and wanted to point out that the reason that I was focusing on artists was on the theory that if there are a lot of songs here, then normal visitors will come. Normal visitors come to listen to songs, and return periodically to see new songs.