The banner that ran across the top of jamglue.com/contests/bambooshoots, recovered from the still-live static.jamglue.com bucket.
The Bamboo Shoots “Shake it Off” Remix Contest
So far as the archives show, this is the last remix contest Jamglue ran. It opened at midnight Eastern on February 22, 2010, with Epic Records and five stems from “Shake it Off” by Bamboo Shoots, a band of four musicians of Indian descent whose Epic debut, Armour, was on the way. Entries and votes were both due by April 4, 2010.
The contest ran its course normally. 66 entries by March 5, 137 by March 9, 314 by March 27, 367 by April 2, and by the middle of April the page had switched over to “This contest is closed to new entries; stay tuned for winner announcements!” with 399 entries created. Under the rules the winner was to be selected on or about April 22.
No winner announcement was ever archived, and jamglue.com went dark on May 5, 2010, thirteen days after the judging date. The last Jamglue contest simply stops mid-sentence.
No audio from this contest survives. The stems and the entries sat behind a Jamglue sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files. What follows is the page itself: the words, the rules, the counts, and the art.
About the Contest
“Jamglue and Epic Records are excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Shake it Off’ by Bamboo Shoots.” Four steps followed, unchanged from the ones Jamglue had been running since 2007, quoted as they read on March 9, 2010:
Enter the contest by creating your own version of the official contest mix. The easiest way to do this is to click the “Start Mixing Now!” button and then “SAVE A COPY” in the Mixer.
Remix the song by adding new sounds, rearranging the clips, etc. using the Jamglue Mixer. You can even add your own voice using the Jamglue Recorder in the Mixer. Be creative, and don't forget to publish your mix when you're done so that people can vote for it!
Promote your mix: embed it in your MySpace and email a link to all of your friends. When someone marks your mix as a Favorite, that counts as a vote, so break out your address book and encourage your friends to vote for yours!
Win great prizes!
The Materials
“Here's what you have to work with.” The contest mix plus five tracks, the last set of stems Jamglue ever published. Each one still has an archived page; none still has audio.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be personally chosen by Bamboo Shoots. The winner gets an FL Studio 9 Signature Bundle.”
“Five Popular Vote winners will be chosen by the Jamglue community. Each winner gets a Jamglue prize pack with a T shirt and stickers.”
The official rules are terser than the page: they list one grand prize only, “One (1) copy of the FL Studio package by Image Line Software,” with an estimated retail value of one hundred dollars, and set the judging criteria as originality, creativity, concept and presentation, 25% each, with the winner to be selected on or about April 22, 2010.
Handing a producer a copy of FL Studio is a fitting last prize for a site whose entire premise was that you did not need a studio.
The Last Ten Weeks
| Feb 22, 2010 | The entry period opens at 12:00 a.m. Eastern. |
| Mar 5, 2010 | First capture of the live page: 66 entries created so far. |
| Mar 9, 2010 | 137 entries created so far. |
| Mar 27, 2010 | 314 entries. The crawler now visits almost daily. |
| Mar 29, 2010 | 335 entries. |
| Mar 31, 2010 | 344 entries. |
| Apr 2, 2010 | 367 entries. The last capture of the page while the contest was still open. |
| Apr 4, 2010 | Entry and voting deadline. |
| Apr 15, 2010 | Closed to new entries, waiting on winners: 399 entries created. This is the last capture of the page that exists. |
| Apr 22, 2010 | The judging date named in the rules. |
| May 5, 2010 | Jamglue shuts down. |
How It Ended
On April 15, 2010, eleven days after the deadline, a crawler following the homepage banner link caught the page in its final state. The whole “About the Contest” section had been replaced by one line:
About the Contest
“This contest is closed to new entries; stay tuned for winner announcements!”
jamglue.com/contests/bambooshoots, April 15, 2010, the last capture ever taken.
That is where the record stops. Three weeks later the site was gone, and the 399 remixes went with it, along with the ones from the Wiz Khalifa contest that were also still waiting on a result.
What survives: the brief, the rules, the stem list, the band's bio, the entry counts and the skin. No winners, because none were ever published, and we have not invented any. If the band chose a remix before the lights went out, nothing in the public record says so.
About Bamboo Shoots
The bio on the contest page, quoted in part:
“There's something odd about Bamboo Shoots. That all of the members are of Indian descent at a time when Indian culture is exploding globally is surely... noteworthy. ‘We gave up on fitting in a long time ago,’ states singer/guitarist Avir Mitra with a shrug.”
“Mix innovative hooks and lean guitars with urban inspired beats and subtle world flavor, add a dash of Brooklyn cred but temper it with a lyrical openness: now you begin to get at the sound of Armour, their Epic Records debut. It's future-feeling and it's retro and it almost didn't happen.”
“Avir and bassist/vocalist Karl Sukhia began playing music together after bumping heads as kids in the Zoroastrian community to which their parents belonged. They recorded songs on an old PC with a pencil mic. It was several years before they met drummer Shiv Puri, a brilliant finance student who needed something more to crunch than numbers. At their first practice, friend of a friend Ankur Patel showed up with what was to become a key ingredient, an Indian folk drum called the dhol. They covered Hall and Oates. Ankur, an up-and-coming DJ, wove 808s and percussion into the mix and was in the band by day's end.”
“Still, it's hard to describe the reaction Bamboo Shoots gets at their live shows, where sets become excuses for all-night dance parties. Things just connect. Indeed, there is something unpredictably odd going on here. Let's hope it stays that way.”
The page linked out to myspace.com/bambooshoots and nowhere else.
The Official Rules
These are the Sony template again, the same document that ran on the GS Boyz contest the previous summer with the names swapped: Sony Music Entertainment as Sponsor, U.S. residents 13 and over only, a perpetual worldwide license to Sponsor over every submission, notarized affidavits, New York law, and the same all-caps line under the prize:
“NOTE: BY WINNING THIS CONTEST THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT YOUR AUDIO REMIX WILL BE USED BY SPONSOR, JAMGLUE OR OTHERWISE.”
One difference from the GS Boyz rules is worth noting: there is no public vote in this document at all. The contest page promised five popular vote prizes, but the rules describe a single grand prize judged entirely by the band. The
March 9, 2010 capture has them in full.
The Skin
Each contest got its own stylesheet, and this was the last one Jamglue wrote. It took the page to black and set its heading color to #ec2e84, with this backdrop centered behind the 760px content column.
bambooshoots_bg.jpg, the page backdrop.
Sources
The live page two weeks in: the description, the deadlines, the five stems, the prizes, the band's bio and the full Official Rules.
The published entries two days before the deadline, out of 367 created in all. Six good captures of this page survive from March 27 to April 2, 2010, plus one that caught a server error.
The last capture of the contest while it was still open to entries.
The final state, reached through the homepage banner link: closed, waiting on winners, 399 entries created. Nothing later than this exists.
static.jamglue.com
The contest banner, the page backdrop and the skin stylesheet, mirrored from Jamglue's original S3 bucket, which is still serving.
