The banner that ran across the top of jamglue.com/contests/gsboyz, recovered from the still-live static.jamglue.com bucket.

The GS Boyz “Booty Dew” Remix Contest

In July 2009 Jamglue put the multitrack session for “Booty Dew” by the GS Boyz, the Texas group behind “Stanky Legg,” on the open web. Sony Music Entertainment was the sponsor of record, entry questions went by post to Jive Records, and the entry window ran from 1:00 a.m. EDT on July 15, 2009 to 11:59:59 p.m. EDT on August 14, 2009. Four stems plus an official contest mix went up; anyone could copy the mix in the Jamglue Mixer and build a version of their own.

It became one of Jamglue's largest contests. Four days in, the page counted 282 entries created. By August 26 it read 1,267. The results page, archived the following spring, settled at 1,207 and named eleven winners: a grand prize the GS Boyz picked themselves, and ten runners-up.

No audio from this contest survives. The stems and the winning remixes lived behind a Jamglue sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files, and nothing has turned up anywhere else. What follows is the page itself: the words, the rules, the names, and the art.

About the Contest

“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Booty Dew’ by Jive Records recording artist GS Boyz.” Four steps followed, quoted as they read on July 19, 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!

Winners

“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the March 29, 2010 capture of the contest page. Titles are given as the page rendered them, expanded from the mix URLs where the page truncated them.

Grand Prize Winner

Runners Up

“These were also picked by the GS Boyz. Each winner gets an autographed CD single of ‘Stanky Legg’ and a copy of the ‘Booty Dew’ CD single.”

What survives: eleven usernames, eleven titles, and eleven mix IDs. Not one of the winning mix pages was ever crawled, and no audio from any of them exists in any archive we can find. This is the whole of what is left of 1,207 remixes.

About GS Boyz

The contest page carried this artist bio, quoted from an interview it credited to KeepItTrill.com:

“Following the paradigm put forth by Soulja Boy, the next wave of grass-roots groundshakers is here: meet The GS Boyz. Looking to combat the escalating gang-related violence they witnessed daily, the GS Boyz focused on making positive, feel-good music that'd move people to dance, not fight.

“After millions of hits on YouTube, a song and dance sensation was born, now reverberating through clubs and pounding out of passing cars. But lest you dismiss them as sheer copycats, note that Soulja Boy himself co-signed the talented Texas two-steppers, inviting them to participate on his national tour.”

The page linked out to gsboyz.net and myspace.com/gsboyz. Neither is a working destination today.

The Official Rules

The page carried the full Official Rules, seven sections long, at the bottom. They are the most substantial legal artifact of any Jamglue contest we have recovered, and they read like a major label's standard sweepstakes paper stretched over a user-generated remix: eligibility limited to U.S. residents 13 and over, a worldwide perpetual license to Sponsor over every submission, notarized affidavits from winners, New York courts, and this all-caps footnote directly under the prize list:

“NOTE: BY WINNING THIS CONTEST THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT YOUR AUDIO REMIX WILL BE USED BY SPONSOR, JAMGLUE OR OTHERWISE.”

The sponsor of record was Sony Music Entertainment, 550 Madison Avenue, New York; questions and rules requests went by post to “Jive Records - GS Boyz ‘Booty Dew’ Remix Contest” at the same address. The July 19, 2009 capture has them in full.

The Skin

Every Jamglue contest got its own skin: a stylesheet at stylesheets/contests/gsboyz.css that swapped the page background, the content backdrop and the heading colors. These files and their art are still sitting in Jamglue's old S3 bucket. The GS Boyz skin tiled a strip across the top of the page and dropped this backdrop behind the content column, with white and semi-transparent boxes floated over it.

Sources