The Jah-I-Witness Emcee “Here in the Ghetto” Remix Contest

Four of the five contests recovered here were run with a record company: Jive, Babygrande, Gracie. This one was run with a rapper. Jah-I-Witness Emcee was an independent artist from the Washington DC area with a second solo album out, The Struggle, The Love, The Glory, and in June 2009 he put “Here in the Ghetto” on Jamglue on the same terms a major label got: six tracks under a Creative Commons license, a page of official rules, and his own name in the sponsors clause next to Jamglue Inc.

The prize list is the tell. Where a label offered a Frank 151 skate pack and a MySpace feature, Jah-I offered a $100 gift certificate to Guitar Center and a free vocal drop recorded for the winner. It worked about as well as the label contests did: 77 entries within two days, 183 within a week, 314 by the time the results page was archived.

About the Contest

“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Here in the Ghetto’ by Jah-I-Witness Emcee.” The four steps, as they read on June 17, 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 page’s artist blurb was written by someone who had actually listened: “As Jah I tells his story, what’s important to note about this album is that these three words represent the life of every human being on this planet we call Earth.” It credits production to Kokayi, Progressive, St. Paul, and Jah-I himself, who produced ten of the album’s fifteen tracks.

The Leaderboard, Five Weeks Early

This is the one contest where the archive caught the voting in progress. On June 21, 2009, five weeks before entries closed, a crawler saved the entries list sorted by most votes. The top of it read:

Those first five names are, in a different order, exactly the five popular vote winners announced at the end. Five weeks and roughly 130 more entries later, the standings had not moved. Whoever got their friends voting in the first week of a Jamglue contest had effectively already won.

Winners

“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Six mixes were named: one grand prize picked by Jah-I, and five popular vote winners. Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the April 3, 2010 capture of the contest page.

Grand Prize Winner

Popular Vote

“These were the mixes with the most votes by Jamglue users. Each winner gets a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”

Of the two that were archived, willman896’s is the fuller record: 92 bpm, listened to 1,788 times, rated 4.5 out of 5, and still carrying its Creative Commons license when the page was crawled in March 2010, months after Jamglue had stopped running contests.

The last of those links goes to an earlier version of the same mix. When it was crawled in June 2009 it was called “[AceOnDaTrack] Here in the Ghetto Contest Entry,” which is also how it appears on the June 21 leaderboard; by the time the results were posted it had been renamed “Jah-I-Witness - Here in the Ghetto.”

What survives: six names, six titles, a mid-contest leaderboard, and two of the six mix pages. No audio, and nothing at all of the winning entry beyond its name. Of the five contests rebuilt here, this is the one where the least of the actual music made it out.

Sources