You're looking back in time: Jamglue ran from 2006 to 2010. This page is a retrospective built from the public record.
Quick Links:About the Contest | The Materials | The Prizes | The Deadlines | Winners | The Song | Sources
The contest banner as it ran on Jamglue, from spring 2009. Recovered from Jamglue's own static image bucket.
The Charlie Wilson “Let It Out” Remix Contest
Jive Records gave Jamglue the session for “Let It Out” from Charlie Wilson's Uncle Charlie in spring 2009, and it came with something the other contests did not have: Snoop Dogg's verse as its own separate stem, next to a track of pure SFX. Wilson picked the grand prize winner himself, and named ten runners up, the longest winners list of the five contests recovered here. The final count was 457 entries.
This page is rebuilt from a capture of the live contest page and a capture of the same URL a few months later, after the results were posted.
About the Contest
“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Let it out’ by Jive Records recording artist Charlie Wilson.” The four steps, quoted as they read on April 3, 2009:
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. The 100 mixes with the most votes will be in the running for prizes, so break out your address book and encourage your friends to vote for yours!
Win great prizes!
How the judging worked. A wider funnel than the other contests: 100 finalists rather than 25. From the official rules: “All entries will be judged by the public to determine the top 100 finalists. These finalists will be determined by the number of Jamglue users who called the remix ‘A Favorite.’ All finalists will subsequently be judged by Charlie Wilson (or his representatives) on the basis of the following criteria: originality (25%), creativity (25%), concept (25%), and presentation (25%).” Winners were to be selected on or about May 5, 2009. The sponsor of record was Sony Music Entertainment, and entrants were explicitly “prohibited from downloading the Sponsor Content to their computers,” a tighter leash than the Creative Commons contests Jamglue ran with the independents.
The Materials
“Here's what you have to work with.” The contest page listed the official contest mix plus seven separate tracks:
| Let it Out - Contest Mix | the starting point |
| SFX - Let it Out | not recovered |
| Lead Vocals - Let it Out | not recovered |
| Snoop Dogg Verse - Let it Out | not recovered |
| BG Vocals - Let it Out | not recovered |
| Synths - Let it Out | not recovered |
| Drums - Let it Out | not recovered |
| Bass and Guitar- Let it Out | not recovered |
Splitting Snoop's verse out as its own track is what makes this list interesting: entrants could drop the feature, loop it, or build around it. None of the audio has turned up in any crawl or in the surviving S3 buckets. On the results capture the play buttons next to these tracks are already rendered as disabled: the contest was over and the audio had been switched off.
Licensing. Not Creative Commons. Entrants were authorized to “reproduce, edit, distribute, publicly perform and create derivative works of” the Jive material for the purpose of making a remix and nothing else: “Except as expressly provided for in these Official Rules, no other uses of the Sponsor Content is hereby authorized.”
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be chosen by Charlie Wilson. The winner gets their remix featured on Charlie's web site and MySpace, as well as an autographed poster. Ten runners up get an autographed ‘Uncle Charlie’ album and Jamglue sticker pack.”
The rules put the estimated combined retail value of all eleven prizes at five hundred dollars. No cash, no hardware: this contest paid in Charlie Wilson's attention and a signed CD.
The Deadlines
| Mar 30, 2009 | The entry period opens at 11:59 p.m. ET, per the official rules. |
| Apr 3, 2009 | The Wayback Machine catches the live contest page: 61 entries created so far. |
| May 4, 2009 | Entry deadline and voting deadline, 11:59 p.m. ET. |
| May 5, 2009 | Winners to be selected, per the official rules. |
| Aug 4, 2009 | The results page is captured: eleven winners, 457 entries created in total. |
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Eleven mixes were named: one Grand Prize picked by Charlie Wilson, and ten runners up he chose along the way. Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the archived results page.
Grand Prize Winner
Let it Out - FROZEN MAMMOTH Contest Mix by FROZENMAMMOTH
“This was Charlie's favorite! The winning remix will be featured on his official web site and MySpace, and FROZENMAMMOTH will get an autographed poster.”
FROZENMAMMOTH had taken a Popular Vote prize in the B-Real contest a few weeks earlier, in a contest that overlapped with this one. Whoever this was, they were good at this.
Runners Up
“These were Charlie's runner-up picks as he chose the grand prize winner. They get an autographed ‘Uncle Charlie’ album and Jamglue sticker pack.”
| Charlie Wilson - Let it Out Feat. Snoop D-O-Double-G | AceOnDaTrack |
| Let it Out Remix- Contest Mix | TheDonRon |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix | coolcat77 |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix -Charlie Wilson Ft Snoop Dogg by (GeemiX) 2009 SlickMalik prod | SLicKMaliK |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix [copy] | DJRayeP |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix by Mav | Maverick16R |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix( Big Rick Remix) | blaydeman |
| LET IT OUT by Mike180 | mike180 |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix djstrogonoff's remix | djstrogonoff |
| Let it Out - Contest Mix [copy] (UNFINISHED) | anotherclassicent |
What survives: eleven names and eleven titles, one of which announces itself as unfinished and still won a signed album. The audio does not survive. Jamglue put mix downloads behind a sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files, and none of these remixes has been found anywhere else.
About Charlie Wilson and “Let It Out”
From the bio on the contest page: “As one of the most familiar voices in R&B music, Charlie Wilson needs no introduction. The Tulsa, Oklahoma native and former lead singer of the funkadelic brotherly trio, the GAP Band, is now going two for two with his second solo album, on Jive Records, titled ‘Uncle Charlie.’”
The page also tells the story of the track itself. “Let It Out,” produced by Gregg Pagani, was recorded in Wilson's studio during a visit from Snoop Dogg, who had brought his family to Wilson's ranch to film the season one finale of Snoop Dogg's Fatherhood.
“I was playing Snoop my demos for Uncle Charlie and when he heard ‘Let It Out’ he immediately began spitting his rhyme. It was like it was made for us.”
Charlie Wilson, quoted in the bio on the Jamglue contest page
“It is all about forgetting your problems and letting out your frustrations. And what better way to do that, by dancing the night away?”
Charlie Wilson, on the song
“I've learned a lot from Uncle Charlie about performing. I used to just spit my rhymes but soon realized by watching his interaction with his audience and energy of his performance on stage that it wasn't enough to just rap the song. He has helped me learn to connect with the audience and grow as a performer.”
Snoop Dogg, quoted in the same bio
And the nickname, per Wilson: “Snoop was the one who started calling me ‘Uncle Charlie’ and that nickname has grown to be what I am known as today, the coolest, most fly Uncle you ever had.”
The Page Skin
Every Jamglue contest got its own skin: a banner, a background painting, and a stylesheet that repainted the whole site in the artist's colors for the length of the campaign. Here is the background art that sat behind this one.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/charliewilson while the contest was live: the description, the four steps, the deadlines, the seven stems, the prizes, and the entry count.
The same URL after judging: all eleven winners, the final entry count, Wilson's and Snoop's quotes, and the complete official rules. This capture is the source for every name on this page.
A later capture of the same results page, months before Jamglue shut down.
static.jamglue.com
The banner and background art on this page, pulled from Jamglue's own image bucket, which outlived the site.
Jamglue.com has shut down. Thanks for all your support.
Rebuilt from the Wayback Machine, the original static.jamglue.com S3 bucket, and contemporaneous press · Y Combinator: Jamglue (S06) · the retrospective