Last April, Radiohead invited fans to remix their song, "Nude" for a contest. Contestants could buy different tracks of guitar, bass, vocals etc. from iTunes, plug them right into garage band and get to mixing. It birthed some incredibly creative material including the video posted below, in which one contestant recreates the song entirely with sounds made by old electronics. More on that here.Tomorrow, Radiohead will release similar tracks for "Reckoner" another hit song from their recent album, In Rainbows. Contestants are to submit their work to the same place as the last time, http://radioheadremix.com/
More on the contest here.
There should be some interesting things in the making as of tomorrow.
Here's what I ended up sending Radiohead after noticing peculiarities in the voting on their site:
ReplyDeleteTo Whom It Concern in the Radiohead Family,
I saw the information on your contest to remix your song 'Reckoner'
somewhere in the vast Internet. I'd bought the full 'In Rainbows'
album as a download when it first came out and have thoroughly enjoyed
it. What fun -- remix a song from this album? Yeah! I'll give it a
go!!!
I don't use Apple's Garageband to mix things, so it was a bit trickier
to do this (using Sony's Acid Music), but I don't think I did too bad
of a job, but of course, I started with pretty brilliant materials
(aka your original tracks!). I uploaded the remixed track, #896, to
your Reckoner remix website. I then checked out the front page on the
submittal web site. Some good mixes; others, not my cup of tea. Seemed
like a lot of votes for some of these tracks, but I thought "Folks are
using their web sites and myspace, so that must be how they've gotten
thousands of hits already." I voted for myself. I checked back. No
bump up in votes. I created a myspace site for my band and posted the object there pointing to my track on the remix site. No
bump. I went back to your Top 10 site for remixes. The voting for
these tracks continued to grow steadily, by what seemed to be hundreds
per day. I asked myself "How are people finding out about these top 10
tracks?" By now, it had been at least a couple of months or more since
you all had announced the contest, so I'm sure the number of hits on
the Top 10 page would have dropped off significantly. How were these
folks getting the message out about their songs? I googled the song
titles for the top 3 (as of 2008-11-06):
RECKONER_NASTY FISH RMX, 10037 votes, By Nicola Olivetti
RECKONER (MALFORMATIONISM), 9965 votes, By JASON WENDEL
RECKONER (WOT D' YA RECKON MIX,) 9460 votes, By Contract Jack
What comes back from google? What would you *expect* would come back
from google, given the number of positive votes? I expected *lots* of
hits. Surely they must have posted references to their remixed tracks
everywhere on the web to create a viral environment that marketing
mavens would drool over? The answer is, curiously enough -- not many
hits! A couple of these folks have videos on youtube, but only with
250 hits there? Very Weird! For their myspace sites they must generate
hits, sure, but even with lots of "friends" (like even a couple of
thousand), this doesn't make sense! Their personal web sites? Hmmm.
These folks don't seem like remix "stars"! I don't know about you, but
this seemed suspicious to me!
So, how could someone drive these types of massive viral hits, PLUS
get them to give a positive click-votes for their song? As your rules
state, voting is limited by your IP address. Here's my thesis
question: Is there some way these folks are connecting that are from
unique IP addresses and voting for themselves? From here, I embarked
on a journey that you all might be interested in:
Method #1 to answer my thesis question: Couldn't you do this from your
Internet connection in your house? I tried this. My DSL ISP doesn't
assign me address from a pool of IP addresses. This may change after a
day, but appears to be cached so you are given the same IP address,
even if you unplug your machine from your connection to the ISP and
reconnect. So, I suppose you could do one a day -- not enough to get
you into the thousands of votes, so this method is out.
Method #2 to answer my thesis question: How about using your laptop
and going to business' advertising "Free WiFi" hotspots so that you
could vote using an IP address from there? I spent a couple hours one
afternoon poking around to try this from all of the ISP's in my town.
Maybe I could just go to one, connect, vote, then disconnect, revote,
disconnect, repeat the process? Again, it seems these folks WiFi
rounters handing out IP addresses cache my machine's physical wireless
address, and so hand me out the same IP address, even if I disconnect
and reconnect. So, I went ahead and visited all of these wide-open
WiFi nets, only netting one IP address from each WiFi net. In a couple
of hours of driving around, I visited about a dozen sites and
therefore was able to nick as many votes. This would take forever to
do at this rate, and I'd run out of wide-open WiFi's and have to keep
traveling farther from home, so this method also is out.
Method #3 to answer my thesis question: How about putting the web
reference/object where lots of people will see it? OK, I put this on
my myspace site. I looked up the top dozen artists on iTunes. I then
went back to MySpace, became friends with most of the people on this
list, then posted the web address or object back to my remix on the
radiohead site. I've got a lot more (marketing?) "friends" now on
MySpace, but the votes only went up by 10-20; not the way to generate
thousands of votes! I then found out about the new mtv beta site just
for videos (www.mtvmusic.com), located the top viewed (of all time)
videos there, and posted comments on the top 20-30 videos, using my
remix object as a tag line. I'm going to estimate the first couple
days after this I got 15-20 votes, but then it really dropped off, so
don't think this is the way to get thousands of votes, either.
Method #4 to answer my thesis question: How about using anonymous web
browsing aka anonymous web proxy? Given the above trial-and-error
failures, I really began to realize that these votes for the top 10
folks didn't add up (literally!) I'm not sure why it popped in my
head, but I'd seen somewhere a while back about sites that allow you
to browse the web anonymously. Surely if you can do this, your IP
address must be hidden, i.e., you're given another IP address, rather
than the one your ISP gives you? The answer is what I found at
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_web_browsing
and after browsing the web, and trying a couple of these sites, I
confirm, yes, you do get an IP address that is passed to the web site
you browse through via the web proxy server, so you could go to the
Radiohead remix site and vote for yourself and no one would be the
wiser!
After a bit more web surfing on this subject, I discovered the
megasite of all web proxy browsing sites: http://proxy.org
Aye, Carumba -- over 25,000 web site proxy servers -- that's a lot of
votes!!! I had to try this to make sure. By hand, I could add about 1
vote per minute to my remixed song on your site! Just think if you
were a half-way decent web coder/scripter what you could do: automate
going to proxy sites, going to the remix site and voting -- probably
with less than the push of a (software) button! My conclusion is that
this last method seems to be an easy way "stuff the ballot box " at
the Radiohead remix site!
Well, I thank you for your patience, as you've read this far! I feel
better now that I have figured out how this is being done, but more
importantly, having told you all about it. I really did enjoy working
on the remix, it was great fun -- please do this again (but more
tracks would be even more fun!!!). However, as far as popularity
contests/voting goes, et al -- you might want to rethink how you do
this, or at least alert folks posting remixes as to how votes can be
accumulated on your site for contests like this.
Cheers!