The Song Fight Bulletin Board

All this archive talk really ought to be in another thread. MODERATOR!

fluffy, I like that I can still get a rise out of you. It's fun for me, even after six years.

Here is a serious suggestion and I'm not even kidding and I don't care who doesn't like it: Put the songs back in alphabetical order by artist. I hate this randomizing crap.

And that's all I'm going to say for now. Good day.

frankie big face wrote:Put the songs back in alphabetical order by artist. I hate this randomizing crap.

click the cover art and get http://www.songfight.org/currentsong.php

You're welcome.

jackfrost wrote:

Caravan Ray wrote:

jackfrost wrote: i'm sure if this was implimented the abuse would outweight the benefits. people would "bad" tag artists they didn't like and "good" tag themselves, along with every variation of friend flooding of the tags. .

Err...yeah - that is how it would be supposed to work. It seems to work on somesongs.

the way i see it: the purpose of the archive is to archive. i don't want johnny songfuck's opinion to influence what songs i would choose to listen to whenever i open up an old fight. not knowing what is behind the artist names is half the fun. why not just have a separate part of the message board for "my favorite songfight songs" and that way johnny songfuck can post (with hyperlinks) lists of his favorite artists and songs and expound on how great his taste is?

No, I'm not interested in what Johnny Whathisname's favourite songs are either. That's why I suggested the somesongs example where who gives what score is anonymous (i think). I'm interested in seeing a quantitative assessment of what is appealing to John Q Public in general. Specifically (and selfishly) I'd like to be able to go to my own vast catalogue - and see them listed with a score next to each one, based on thumbs up/down, or good/bad/ok, or score-out-of-10, or whatever...and hence get a bit of an idea how the punters are hearing things. And yes - I could post all my songs on somesongs to do that....but they're already here, so I probably won't bother.

frankie big face wrote:All this archive talk really ought to be in another thread. MODERATOR!

But I offered the "let's rate songs in the archive" suggestion as a means of providing a simple and less time-consuming way to give feedback within the context of large one-title fights.

Sit back down Moderator.

Hang on - you "probably won't bother" to post your songs to a website whose format already offers exactly what you're reccommending?

Caravan Ray, you officially win the inaugural 'Johnny Songfuck' Hat of the week. It's a bit like NotW, only stickier ...

I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement, but I had a little idea to go along with Mr. Ray's plan.

How about a little button on the mainpage that says "Rate/Review". Whether or not you need to log in can be decided later. A little screen comes up with the entire fight streaming, and as you listen, you rate each song (stars) in the stream box and write comments on it in the thread. You can go back and forth between songs to relisten to them, but only once you click "Submit" are your star marks submitted. To submit star marks, you need to rate every song.

Do you like?

j$ wrote:Hang on - you "probably won't bother" to post your songs to a website whose format already offers exactly what you're reccommending?

Caravan Ray, you officially win the inaugural 'Johnny Songfuck' Hat of the week. It's a bit like NotW, only stickier ...

Hey - back off dude. Putting all my songs on somesngs would take, like a hundred mouseclicks or something. I've no time for that, I'm a busy man....

Now - tell me more about this hat. I get to wear it all week! It's not going to make me look stupid or anything, is it?

Reïst wrote:I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement, but I had a little idea to go along with Mr. Ray's plan.

How about a little button on the mainpage that says "Rate/Review". Whether or not you need to log in can be decided later. A little screen comes up with the entire fight streaming, and as you listen, you rate each song (stars) in the stream box and write comments on it in the thread. You can go back and forth between songs to relisten to them, but only once you click "Submit" are your star marks submitted. To submit star marks, you need to rate every song.

Do you like?

Having it on the front page would usurp the fight voting buttons. I didn't want to change the voting system for the fight at all - that's why I suggested hiding it out back in the archive.

Though I like the idea that it seems sort of automated. Didn't Dre make a review template where all the song names come up? Maybe add a star rating system to that template - set up a one-stop-review-shop for the busy executive. I could even hire homeless people to listen to the songs for me and take myself out of the process all together.

This is an interesting development.

J$, you better be in this week.

Bien sur. Et toi?

So how is the two-fight experiment going so far?

Let's look at some numbers. The last fight had thirty entries, this one a total of thirty-two, so there are more entries this week. Attributable to the format? Probably not. "And Counting" had thirty-two a few fights back.

The format certainly cut down on the number of songs in a fight. As noted, the previous fight, "Just To Be Difficult" consisted of thirty entries, while the two-fight format this week split the entries into thirteen for "I Want To Get On It" and nineteen for "Credible Threat" this week, making for a shorter listen, an easier voting decision, and more reviews, right?

Not necessarily. "Just To Be Difficult" garnered eleven reviews, while this week's "I Want To Get On It" has only six so far, while "Credible Threat" has nine. Eighty-nine people voted in "JTBD", and so far thirty have voted in one fight and fifty-one in the other. That's not only less votes per fight, that's less votes overall. This would appear to the opposite of what we were shooting for here, folks. So far, you would have gotten more reviews entering last week, before the split. Maybe the QUALITY of the reviews is up? Dunno. You tell me. It IS interesting that thirteen of the fifteen reviewers for this week's fights did not review last week, so maybe the smaller fights appeal to a different crowd. It's also a substantially different group of fighters in the fights, so that probably has a lot to do with it as well.

Perhaps you will be tempted to say that it isn't the deadline yet, there was a holiday in the schedule, and we should hold off on calling it a failure. I certainly agree. We'll give it a few more fights to see what the trends might really show.

I am really just trying to flush a few more reviewers and voters out of the woodwork before the weekend is upon us. As noted by a lonely Lord of Oats recently, this place is dead on the weekends, so these numbers are likely to hold up unless you step in and do something about it.

SPUD

Well, yeah, it's all about trends and not about single measurements. That's why I made the graphs, because it's easy to cherrypick non-representative numbers. Also, it's not as if anyone expected an instant change, right?

Considering that right now, people are just beginning to comment on yesterday's DRC thread, it's pretty obvious that activity is lowered here for the time being anyway.

fluffy wrote:stuff

Duly noted.

personally, i'm a fan of one title per fight.
so far...
the review quality has not gone up.
the review quantity seems to be less.
since i wanted to hear what everyone had done, i ended up listening to both fights and it all just blends into one anyway.
i'm curious though, as you said, to see if this is just due to the holiday season, but now that most of us are probably back to life as usual, there hasn't been a rush of reviews for these smaller fights.
i've also noticed that some of the reviewers of the smaller fights are still not reviewing every song in that fight (and i'm not talking about ambient noise entries or green day rip-offs, i'm talking about structured, full-length, multi-tracked songs). i thought one of the main points of multi-titles was to get fights that were easier to listen to and thus generate more and better quality reviews.
but, i guess the bottom line is that people will complain about any and all aspects of the entire process, but the people who want to better their songwriting will write no matter what, the people who want to give their opinions will give it no matter what, and the people who want to just rip at other people will rip at other people no matter what. but i think all those people mentioned are grateful that they have a place to engage in their respective behaviors.

Spud wrote:So how is the two-fight experiment going so far?


I am really just trying to flush a few more reviewers and voters out of the woodwork before the weekend is upon us.

It's almost like the the heisenberg uncertainty principle in action!

(or, less obscurely: If you want to accurately measure something, it might be best to not try to influence it at the same time.)

obscurity wrote:If you want to accurately measure something, it might be best to not try to influence it at the same time.

Ah, but my goal of influencing it trumps my goal of measuring it. As fluffy noted, my measurements are not only premature, but represent a single point in time, in a single instance. They are in fact, totally useless as trend data. They MAY be useful, however, in beating some reviewers out of the bushes.

Spud wrote:They MAY be useful, however, in beating some reviewers out of the bushes.

Above statement + your avatar = hilarity

Let's also take into account the side fights (GOM--of which we're in the "oh shit" period, and Purple Reign) currently going on... Dilution, yeah.

But to be brutally honest, in more ways than one, I'm only reviewing the fights I'm in (I think I flaked on one, though ), and I rarely listen to fights I'm not in, unless it's tagged as really fucking good by: reviewers whose opinions and tastes I respect; friends who've said "you've got to hear this/these songs. Dude!".

Participation, as in submitting a song, is what drives me to give a critical ear and put those listenings into words. The big-ass fights are too much for the casual "I've got a half hour free, let's hear what's going on in songfightland and say my piece" 'cause in my opinion, if you're going to review a fight, you do the whole damned thing. And the current dilution (see above) has me kind of schitzy, attention-wise. That and trying to get a band together for regular live playing (it's like herding cats, heh), chasing labels' come-ons (damned flaky indie gestalt), and the rest of the meat life stuff (new wife, randomly vomiting dog, job, &c.) is there, too.

So I guess that puts me in the three title camp, heh. Why did I just post a LOOian justification? Oy. Saw some good local live music tonight. And found myself at one degree of separation from Jello Biafra. Go figure, life's... interesting.

Hoblit wrote:

Spud wrote:They MAY be useful, however, in beating some reviewers out of the bushes.

Above statement + your avatar = hilarity

I know, why is Spud holding a corn dog?

Well, I've listened to all of the songs in the fight that I am in twice now and will write reviews this weekend. That's something that I was able to do only rarely in the big fights. As a result I will also vote this time which is something that I wouldn't do without listening to all of the songs.

A fight of 13 songs is much more approachable than one of 30.

Steve

I don’t participate often enough that I should really get a say in this but I’m going to chime in anyway because I’m not sure I’ve seen my thoughts put forth by anyone else.

I like the multiple titles because it enables the creation of better songs. More reviews? Great, I guess. More votes? Don’t really care. Better music? This is a good thing.

It’s the exact opposite of much of what we like to do around here. The very essence of songfight – write and record a song in a week – may get procrastinators moving and perfectionists stopped, but it does this by lowering the bar: don’t do the best you can but the best you can in the time allowed. In sidefights and such, we like to add even more restrictions. I wish we got more of “Hey, I just put a disc out on CD Baby that I’ve been working on for a year and a half” and less of “Here’s my latest AAD – eighteen hours straight and I was fdrinking for most of them!!!1!”

Multiple titles does the opposite. It expands one’s options instead of removing them. I don’t know if, in practice, that leads to better songs but it seems like it should.

Also, for me personally, it probably means more frequent participation. I have a fairly hectic schedule and think about songfighting maybe 6 or 8 times a year. If I click over one of those times and see “Banana Dandruff”, I’ll probably pass. But if I get to choose between “Banana Dandruff” and “Dandy Band Riff”, I’m at least a little more likely to get inspired.

I don’t know if I put that very well but it was the best I could do with the time I allowed myself.

i think one area that is primarily affected are what i'll call the "rabid" demographic, namely people that will usually only listen/review the fight they are in (and this is not a criticism, just an observation). and i'd be willing to bet there's quite a few people here (myself included). they are much more likely to follow through (and meet their self-imposed moral obligation) than flake (fuck the moral obligation, that's too much work) with a smaller fight.

either way, i think you gotta give it time like you said. but if you end up with 2 fights of 30 each, all you've really accomplished is more work for our benevolent fightmasters (and probably more delays in posting songs and titles as a subsequent result). maybe more exposure from more people participating too, which wouldn't be a bad thing for those with songs, but it wouldn't have solved the problem people seem so anxious to solve.