OurStage lets bands compete to win prizes

I tend to be skeptical of "battle of the bands" contests in the physical world. There's often an entry fee to participate, which basically means bands are paying to play in some sort of showdown showcase. Often there's no quality gate--if you can afford the entry fee, you're in, and that means that the only people in the audience are other participating bands. The prizes tend to be loaded with catches, like a "recording contract" that forces you to sign over your publishing rights to the organization sponsoring the contest.

But it appears that some online competitions are actually worthwhile. The other night I took a look at OurStage, which launched in September. There's no fee to enter, and artists retain full rights to their music. The prizes are worth competing for: winners of each monthly contest can take home $5,000 in cash, win mentoring sessions with music industry folks, and even earn slots at festivals people actually care about like Bonnaroo.

The song on the left is good, but it's not experimental--clean vocals, jazz chords, and a drum machine. The song on the right isn't particularly experimental either, but there's no New Age category, so it's a reasonable fit.

(Credit: OurStage screenshot)

From a fan's perspective, the voting interface is excellent, and the company claims to have taken pains to make it hard for artists to game the system--you're seldom asked to vote on the same act twice, and never asked to vote on the same head-to-head matchup. After spending a couple hours with it, I can say that the artists on the site compare favorably to Garageband.com, a very similar service that later spawned iLike, a social-networking service for discovering and recommending music.

Still, OurStage suffers from the same problem that I experienced with Garageband.com: there's not much incentive to keep voting. I like to hear new music, but of the 20 or so songs I sampled on OurStage, only three were interesting enough for me to listen all the way through. I can't imagine that casual music fans will spend a lot of time listening to unknown bands on the site unless OurStage offers some incentive--say, a chance to win free downloads from big-name artists, concert tickets, or other prizes.

The other problem: lax enforcement of genres. I like experimental music, but found lots of other types of songs in that category, including Christian guitar rock, hip-hop, and jazz-pop, all of which would fit better into other genres. I imagine these artists thought it'd be easier to win in the experimental channel than in the more popular channels. I guess they didn't expect any Moonchild fans to check them out.

[brianourstage]

Matt,

Thanks for covering OurStage! I just wanted to respond to a couple of the points made in your blog post so that your readers know that we're covering them. We are aware that judging for long periods of time can be fun for some users, and feel a little tedious for others. We're working on some new features for the Judging experience that will make it a lot more exciting for those users who started to get tired of it after 20 or 50 battles.

Also, during our Finals Week judging (which starts next Wednesday, by the way) the Top 20's and so on compete in elimination rounds of judging. It's a really great way to hear a lot of the best music on OurStage really quickly, since the Top 20 entries have already been sorted for you.

Finally, we do have staff on hand to respond to complaints about genres on OurStage, and they work diligently to make sure that our channels are appropriately filled. Unfortunately, that means if our fans are not flagging items for being off-topic (a la YouTube), we may not hear about them for some time. That is the unfortunate nature of all user-generated content sites.

Thanks again, and please let me know if you have any questions!

Brian Whalley
Community Manager
OurStage.com

[winterband]

AOL's Ourstage has deleted the WinterBand fan page on behalf of a handful of people who don't like what we teach and filed frivolous "complaints"

This is NOT ABOUT RELIGION. This is about corruption and/or incompetent Ourstage staff going along with some people who didn't like us and removing an established competitive band without cause.

Details and documentation are available at:

http://www.ourstage.ws

What has happened is outrageous religious censorship and discrimination.
Whether you love us or hate us consider the precedent that this situation establishes.

If anyone you know is investing time and effort building a presence and network of connections on Ourstage you owe it to them to make them aware of what is going on.

Bro Steve Winter

[winterband]

We were blessed to get a tip that our now deleted Ourstage fan page was still cached on Google. Now all can see the content that the corrupt staff at Ourstage lied about! Please WARN any and all you know who are participating on Ourstage about the corruption and dishonesty there. Post the link to our site in channel comments and song and video comments at Ourstage and in blogs.

Details and now documentation are available at:

<a href="http://www.ourstage.ws">http://www.ourstage.ws</a>

Or

<a href="http://www.winterband.com/Ourstage.html">www.winterband.com/Ourstage.html</a>

Regards, and thanks for your support!

Bro. Steve Winter