Summer Orgafun!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What's been good about the League Of Pop:

- Terrific vehicle for hearing new music
- Enjoyable as a game but also challenging/infuriating/shocking in places
- Orgafun structure works fine (a few tweaks for Season 2 I'm sure)

Problems with the League Of Pop:

- Hasn't involved or engaged non-players much (correct me if I'm wrong, spectators)
- Requires significant time commitment to enter
- Requires less work on my part than I thought it might but still quite a lot

None of these problems are so serious that I want not to do it again - but I will wait a while before the next 'season'. All of the problems are resolvable by a simple format tweak. So the next Poptimists event will be...

The Pop Open - a Summer tournament of taste. I haven't finalised the instructions but it will go a little something like this:

- Players submit tracks, which are anonymised and posted by me and voted on by the community as a whole, in groups or pairs.
- To give a loose structure to things, each round will be themed (eg "love", "fear", "politics") to give baffled spectators some sort of point of comparison.
- Depending on how many people enter, this will be a straight knockout, or a short round-robin leading to final knockout stages. So the commitment will be much smaller, even for winning players. And because each match only involves a couple of players we can be way more flexible as to holidays, and it's much less work for me.
- The fun for spectators is hearing and voting on new tracks (as ever). The fun for players is either pleasing the crowd or finding out what people really think of their beloved favourite tunes.

Want to play? Nothing will happen until after the LoP ends but I'm interested to know who's up for it. Your only commitment will be to send in tracks (between 1 to 3 depending on format). That's all!

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"Hasn't involved or engaged non-players much"

Well I've rarely downloaded the tracks. i briefly look at the player commentary and try to see if i can guess what it is. But in the end i've only personally known about 6 tracks. i think the personal winners = not much of a temptation to download.

Random suggestion that may or may not improve things. Could you have a MVP vote from spectators?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

For season 2 yes, quite possibly!

The Pop Open will be 2-4 tracks at a time, everyone can d/l, everyone can vote, players and non-players, like the PWC was.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Actually I even wonder if using the FT podcast gizmo would make it even easier to do.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Yes - streaming is much more werk-skiving friendly than downloading anything. However having a dll as well would be nice (esp if the tracks are RILLY good!)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Nooooo I hate streaming, it never works, I can't do it at work, you know where you are with downloading!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

with publishing audio stuff on FT (via podPress) it streams in the in-page viewer, but there's (now) also a download link.

on the other hand I don't know about the bandwidth if we went through the FT servers for this stuff

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's my concern too.

Is there any sendspace-style site for free streaming media hosting? You'd think in terms of advert eyeball time it would be a winning business model.

stream or download

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

There definitely is one - zshare? - that opens a file as streaming by default, but there's a link above that lets you download the file instead/afterword.

(I am definitely more for downloading than streaming, if we have to choose between the two.)