Song of the Week

From GFWiki

Song of the Week is an event in General Game Music Discussion to "promote the proliferation of quality video game music that is seldom heard amongst the society of VGM fans." While most activities take place at GFF, an external website (http://www.songoftheweek.info/) provides a place for posting the winning tracks, providing hosting for the nominees, and displaying other information.

The contest sees around 15 to 20 people voting per week, many of whom have been participating since the contest's inception. It could be considered its own mini-community, with people predicting other's voting patterns before that person has listened to the tracks.

Table of contents
1 Operations

1.1 Nomination Phase
1.2 Voting Phase
1.3 Staff

2 History
3 Related Links
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Operations

This is only a summary. For full details, check the Song of the Week Wiki (http://wiki.songoftheweek.info/index.php?title=Song_of_the_Week).

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Nomination Phase

Any member of the forums can nominate a track for Song of the Week in the active nomination thread, provided it meets certain eligibilty standards. The most important rule is that of reasonable obscurity; the purpose of the event is to showcase obscure music, so songs that are too well-known are rejected. Decisions on what is "too popular" are made on a case-by-case basis with input from staff members and participants. Additionally, songs are restricted to official soundtracks and game rips (original or arranged), original albums by composers of video game music, and unpublished arrangements of VGM tracks by VGM composers. Arrangements by amateur/fan arrangers, songs not from video games (film, etc.), and licensed music are not allowed. Finally, when a song places first, second, or third, all songs from its album are disqualified for twelve, eight, and four weeks respectively.

To nominate a song, all a nominator has to do is post the album and track name in the active nomination thread. However, it is strongly encouraged to provide as much information as possible, including artist, composer (if different from the artist, such as an arranged track), disc and track number, catalog number, and release year. The nominator is also encouraged to upload the nomination to a temporary directory on the Song of the Week site to save the staff time in locating a copy of the track.

There are two queues for nominators, the New Nominators and Previous Nominators queues. If a person nominates and his/her name does not appear in the Previous Nominators, then that person's name and nomination are placed at the bottom of the New Nominators queue. Otherwise, the track information is placed next to the nominator's name in the Previous Nominators queue.

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Voting Phase

Eight tracks are chosen each week from the nomination queues to be voted on. As many names as possible are taken from the top of the New Nominators queue, and more are taken from the Previous Nominators queue to bring the total to eight. Their nominations are placed in a special voting directory and their names are placed at the bottom of the Previous Nominators queue. Anyone whose name is at the top of the nomination queue but has no nomination during this will have his/her name dropped from the queue entirely and, therefore, will be considered a new nominator the next time he/she nominates.

All nominators are given six points to distribute among any number of songs with two restrictions: no song may be given more than three points, and one song at most can be given three points. At the end of the voting period, the points are tabulated to determine the Song of the Week and the runner-ups in second and third places. In the event of a tie for any of these positions, "bonus" points are considered; a song's bonus points are calculated by dividing the number of people who assigned points to that song by two and then adding the number of people who gave it three points.

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Staff

  • CHz - General Manager of Weekly Duties / Nominee Info Research
  • TCK - Nominations Manager / Additional Research
  • Mo0 - Voting Manager (1st Tally)
  • _DH_ - Additional Programming
  • Kaleb.G - Founder, webmaster, programming, graphic design, etc.
  • Secret Squirrel - Main supplier of music for this whole event.
  • Liontamer (Larry Oji) - VG Frequency radio host, and broadcaster of SotW material
  • Drakken - File uploads and removals from SoTW server.
  • orion_mk3 - GFF SoTW thread maintenence.
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History

Song of the Week was proposed (http://www.gamingforce.com/gffarchive/showthread.php?t=47198) by Kaleb.G on August 3, 2004, to general approval. After several weeks of discussion about the proposed rules, the first nomination thread (http://www.gamingforce.com/gffarchive/showthread.php?t=50434) was created on September 13, and voting (http://www.gamingforce.com/gffarchive/showthread.php?t=50587) commenced three days later.

On April 25, 2005, after several weeks of delays due to time constraints, Kaleb.G called for help in running the normal operations of Song of the Week. Several participants stepped forward and offered their services, running the general operations like nominations and voting management while Kaleb continued to work on the backend, updating the site database and files and assisting with research. _DH_ also contributed by writing code to make updating the site easier.

However, in conjunction with a general waning of interest in GFF, even this lightened workload proved too much for Kaleb. So, in September of 2005, even more responsibilities were transferred to the staff, allowing them to fully run Song of the Week and update the main site from Week 33 on. Kaleb still maintains a presence in the event by voting, nominating, and offering assistance and advice.

On June 2, 2006, Mo0 announced his retirement from the Song of the Week staff, after successfully completing his pet project, the Song of the Year contest. The reasons for his leaving were the same as Kaleb's, for the most part. A lack of free time to spend on Song of the Week led Mo0 to step down before he became a detriment to the staff. A second help thread (http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/general-game-music-discussion/7494-song-week-needs-you.html) was created by Kaleb to help find replacements for _DH_, who took a leave to celebrate his marriage, and for Mo0.

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Related Links

Retrieved from "http://gfw.condign.org/wiki/Song_of_the_Week"