You're looking back in time: Jamglue ran from 2006 to 2010. This page is a retrospective built from the public record.
The contest banner as it ran at the top of jamglue.com/contests/grandpuba, summer 2009. It is still sitting on the old static.jamglue.com S3 bucket, which is where this copy came from.
The Grand Puba feat. Q-Tip “Good to Go” Remix Contest
In the summer of 2009, Jamglue ran three contests in a row with Babygrande Records. This was the first of them: “Good to Go,” a Grand Puba track featuring Q-Tip from Retroactive, which had come out on June 23. Six pieces of audio went up under a Creative Commons license, entries were published straight into Jamglue, and Grand Puba picked his own favorite while the community voted for five more. The Wayback Machine captured the live page on June 27, 2009, five days into the entry period, when 92 entries had been created; by the April 2010 capture of the results version, the counter read 361.
About the Contest
“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Good to Go’ by Babygrande recording artist Grand Puba and featuring Q-Tip.” The four steps, as they read on June 27, 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!
The rules were written by Jamglue rather than by a major label’s legal department, and they read like it. The sponsors are listed as Jamglue Inc. of Takoma Park, Maryland, and Babygrande Records of West 23rd Street, New York, and the stated point of the exercise is “the chance to engage in a creative dialogue” with the artist.
The Materials
“Here’s what you have to work with.” One official contest mix plus five separate tracks, including both rappers as separate acapellas:
| Good to Go - Contest Mix | the starting point |
| Puba Acapella - Good to Go | track |
| Q-Tip Acapella - Good to Go | track |
| Bass - Good to Go | track |
| Instrumental - Good to Go | track |
| Vocal Sample - Good to Go | track |
None of the six audio files survives. The 2009 crawls of Jamglue reached the HTML pages but never the audio, which sat behind a sign-in, and no copy has turned up anywhere else.
Licensing. The tracks were “licensed for use solely under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license,” with all other rights reserved by Babygrande Records, and entrants had to attribute using the words “Remix using elements from Grand Puba/Babygrande Records” without implying any endorsement. The winning entry’s mix page still shows its license as Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be chosen by Grand Puba himself. The winner gets a Frank 151 Prize Pack (including skateboard, hats, T-shirts, and book), a copy of Grand Puba’s new ‘Retroactive’ album, and a featured spot on Babygrande.com and Grand Puba’s MySpace.”
“Five Popular Vote winners will be chosen by the Jamglue community. Each winner gets a copy of Grand Puba’s new ‘Retroactive’ album and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
The rules put a number on it: the grand prize had an approximate retail value of $147.98, each runner-up prize $34.98, and a Jamglue prize pack was precisely ten stickers and one T-shirt. Grand Puba listened to the entries and chose personally; the five runners up were simply the five mixes with the most Favorites.
The Deadlines
| Jun 22, 2009 | Entry period opens at approximately 9:00 p.m. PT. |
| Jun 27, 2009 | The Wayback Machine captures the live contest page: 92 entries created so far. |
| Aug 4, 2009 | Publishing deadline, 11:59 p.m. PT. |
| Aug 18, 2009 | Voting closes, 11:59 p.m. PT. |
| By Apr 2010 | The page has been rewritten with the results, and the entry counter shows 361. |
Winners had fourteen days to answer their notification email and Jamglue private message, or the next mix down the list took the prize.
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Six mixes were named: one grand prize picked by Grand Puba, and five popular vote winners. Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the April 3, 2010 capture of the contest page; each mix links to its own archived page where one exists.
Grand Prize Winner
Good to Go - Contest Mix [Salvador 's Copy] by big_boi_teo
“This was Grand Puba’s favorite! The winner big_boi_teo gets a Frank 151 Prize Pack (including skateboard, hats, T-shirts, and book), a copy of Grand Puba’s new ‘Retroactive’ album, and a featured spot on Babygrande.com and Grand Puba’s MySpace.”
Its page was archived on June 29, 2009, three days after it was published and more than a month before the deadline: 103 bpm, 2:52 long, 2.7 MB as an MP3, listened to 306 times, rated 4.6 out of 5 across 47 ratings. The description is not about the music at all. It is the same plea pasted three times over: “I dont do this often but I’m asking you for a HUGE favor... Go on my mix to the song ‘good To Go’ by Grand Puba and favorite it and tell me what you think... PLZZ... if you can, THXX, and if you want, i’ll return the favor...” That was the machinery of a vote-driven contest working exactly as designed, on the entry that ended up winning the half that was not decided by votes.
Popular Vote
“These were the mixes with the most votes by Jamglue users. Each winner gets a copy of Grand Puba’s new ‘Retroactive’ album and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
| Good to Go - Contest Mix [copy] | babygurl_4646 |
| Good to Go (nyo remix) - Contest Mix | nyoutlawz |
| Good to Go -Mess&Larsone RMX | Larsone |
| Good to Go - jazzyj711 | jazzyj711 |
| Grand Puba - Good to Go (feat. Q-Tip) [prod. St. Brown] | SaintBrown |
What survives: six names, six titles, and four of the six mix pages in the Wayback Machine. No audio. Larsone’s and SaintBrown’s entries were crawled only as the small hover popover the site used for its play buttons, so their pages are gone even though the archive knows the mixes existed.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/grandpuba while the contest was live: the four steps, the deadlines, the materials, the prizes, the 92-entry counter, the artist biography and the full official rules.
The same URL after judging, with the grand prize winner and the five popular vote winners. This capture is the source for every name on this page.
big_boi_teo’s entry: tempo, duration, listen count, ratings, license, and the vote-soliciting description.
static.jamglue.com
The banner at the top of this page, still hosted on Jamglue’s original S3 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