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/jkwon, summer 2009. It is still sitting on the old static.jamglue.com S3 bucket, which is where this copy came from.
The J-Kwon “Fly” Remix Contest
J-Kwon had a platinum-adjacent hit in 2004 with “Tipsy” and, five years later, an independent deal with Gracie Productions. In June 2009 he opened “Fly” to the Jamglue community, and this contest carried the best prize Jamglue ever put on a remix: not just a feature and a T-shirt but an iPod Touch and a real commercial release, the winning remix sold on iTunes as the official one. It drew the most entries of any contest on these five pages: 118 within three days of the crawler finding it, 856 by the time the results were archived.
It also has the richest winners structure. Where the other contests awarded one or two tiers of prizes, J-Kwon’s results page named eleven people across three: one grand prize, five popular vote winners, and five honorable mentions the artist picked out himself, a tier that the official rules never mentioned.
About the Contest
“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Fly’ by Gracie Productions recording artist J-Kwon.” The four steps, as they read on June 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!
The rules name three parties in their heading, “Jamglue, Thinktank Marketing and J-Kwon,” though the sponsors clause lists only Jamglue Inc. of Takoma Park, Maryland and Gracie Productions of Noblesville, Indiana.
The Materials
“Here’s what you have to work with.” One official contest mix plus five separate tracks, with the beat broken into four parts:
| Fly- Contest Mix | the starting point |
| Acapella - Fly | track |
| Hypersaw and Strings - Fly | track |
| Drums, Snaps and Claps - Fly | track |
| Bass and Hits - Fly | track |
| Synths - Fly | track |
None of the six audio files survives. The contest audio sat behind a sign-in and no crawler ever reached it.
Licensing. The tracks were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5, with all other rights reserved by Gracie Productions, and entrants had to attribute using the words “Remix using elements from J-Kwon/Gracie Productions.” That is a non-commercial license on the source, with a commercial iTunes release waiting at the end of it for whichever entry J-Kwon liked best.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be chosen by J-Kwon himself. The winner gets an iPod Touch, an opportunity to have their remix sold on iTunes by Gracie Productions, and a featured spot on J-Kwon’s MySpace page.”
“Five Popular Vote winners will be chosen by the Jamglue community. Each winner gets an autographed J-Kwon album and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
The rules valued the grand prize at $147.98 and each runner-up prize at $34.98, and specified that the iTunes release would be billed as the “Official Remix.” A third tier appeared only when the results were published: five honorable mentions, chosen by J-Kwon, each winning a free pack of Jamglue stickers.
The Deadlines
| Jun 16, 2009 | Entry period opens at approximately 8:00 p.m. PT. |
| Jun 19, 2009 | The Wayback Machine captures the live contest page: 118 entries created so far. |
| Jul 29, 2009 | Publishing deadline, 11:59 p.m. PT. |
| Aug 13, 2009 | Voting closes, 11:59 p.m. PT. |
| By Apr 2010 | The page has been rewritten with the results, and the entry counter shows 856. |
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Eleven mixes were named across three tiers. 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
“This was J-Kwon’s favorite! The winner virus187 gets an iPod Touch, an opportunity to have their remix sold on iTunes by Gracie Productions, and a featured spot on J-Kwon’s MySpace page.”
The page was archived on July 24, 2009, three days after the mix went up and five days before the deadline: 154 bpm, 2:20 long, 2.2 MB as an MP3, listened to 2,463 times, rated 4.9 out of 5 across 95 ratings. The description is a small masterclass in how these contests were actually won:
“Here is it at last! My remix of the J-Kwon Fly track with MY OWN BEAT. I only got 7 days left to make it into the top 100 to qualify for the finals! arrggh [...] Please favourite this mix and if you have time i would love to read your reviews! Thank you again for your support on this and my BOOTY DEW MIX (Especially to ma boy ‘DJ Sleazybeans’ who helped promote my contest mixes!) PS - Im still in the top 10 for the booty dew mix contest!”
The Booty Dew mix he mentions was his entry in the GS Boyz contest Jamglue was running at the same time. virus187 also took a popular vote prize in the U-God “Magnum Force” contest. He was working all three at once, and his method never changed: drop the supplied instrumental, build a new beat under the acapella, then campaign for Favorites.
Popular Vote
“These were the mixes with the most votes by Jamglue users. Each winner gets an autographed J-Kwon album and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
| J-know-Fly(remixed by Alin4u)-Contest Mix | alin4u |
| Fly-Remix with own instrumental (Prod. By Ramtien) | ramtien_musicproducer |
| Fly- Newyorkoutlawz Remix | nyoutlawz |
| Fly- Contest Beast On Beats Remix *Note for better quality sound download the track!!!! | Beast_On_Beats |
| Captain JJ Fly Remix | joshjensen02 |
Honorable Mention
“J-Kwon also liked these and wanted to recognize them. Each honorable mention gets a free pack of Jamglue stickers.”
| Fly - JT Mix | JTmoneyBeats |
| J-Kwon - Fly | AceOnDaTrack |
| J-Kwon Fly Remix Contest Entry (Prod. By Al Smith) | alsmith |
| Fly (DJ A.Z.I.Q.U.E. Remix) | zedgat23 |
| Fly remix by theone | theonem |
What survives: eleven names, eleven titles, and five mix pages in the Wayback Machine. No audio, including the remix that was supposed to be sold on iTunes as the official one; whether that release ever happened is not something the public record answers. None of the five honorable mentions has an archived mix page, so for those five entrants a line on this results page is the whole of what is left.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/jkwon while the contest was live: the four steps, the deadlines, the materials, the prizes, the 118-entry counter, the J-Kwon biography and the full official rules.
The same URL after judging, with all three tiers of winners and the 856-entry final count. This capture is the source for every name on this page.
virus187’s entry: tempo, duration, listen count, ratings, license, and the full description quoted above.
The published-entries browser, captured mid-contest.
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