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

The Mams Taylor “Girl Gotta Girlfriend” Remix Contest

In August 2009 Jamglue opened up “Girl Gotta Girlfriend,” a track by the London-born, Los Angeles-based rapper Mams Taylor featuring Snoop Dogg and Bobby V. Seven stems went up, including three separate acapellas: one for each of the three vocalists. Entries opened at 8:00 p.m. Pacific on August 16, 2009 and closed on September 27; voting ran two weeks longer, to October 11.

487 entries were created in all. When the results went up they came in three tiers: a grand prize Mams picked himself, five popular vote winners, and five honorable mentions. That structure, an artist pick plus a vote plus a discretionary shortlist, is the fullest winners' page Jamglue ever published.

No audio from this contest survives. The stems and the entries sat behind a Jamglue sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files. 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 ‘Girl Gotta Girlfriend’ by Mams Taylor featuring Snoop Dogg and Bobby V.” Four steps followed, quoted as they read on August 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, 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 below is taken verbatim from the January 16, 2010 capture of the contest page. Titles are taken from the full title text carried in the capture’s markup. Where a mix page itself was crawled, the title links to it.

Grand Prize Winner

Popular Vote Winners

“Each winner gets an autographed copy of Mams' ‘Girl Gotta Girlfriend’ single and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”

Honorable Mentions

“Mams also liked these and wanted to recognize them. Good work!”

What survives: eleven usernames, eleven titles, and a mix page in the Wayback Machine for seven of the eleven. No audio, including for the grand prize winner, whose mix page was never crawled at all.

The Leaderboard, Mid-Contest

On August 31, 2009, six weeks before voting closed, a crawler caught the entries page sorted by most votes. It is the only ranked snapshot of a Jamglue contest in progress that we have found. Positions one through ten, as they stood that day:

Four of the top five on August 31 were still in the top five when voting closed. The exception is the mix sitting in second place here: Swangin_and_Bangin does not appear anywhere on the final winners page. Whether the mix was overtaken, withdrawn or disqualified, the captures do not say.

About Mams Taylor

The bio on the contest page, quoted in part:

“UK pop artist Mams Taylor's unique sound can only be described as Runk, the bastard offspring of rock, rap, and punk, and it's like nothing you've ever heard before.”

“Mams had written lyrics and programmed beats since he was a teenager, but he never believed it could be a day job, until he moved to L.A. A friend soon introduced him to his Long Beach-born hero Snoop, who agreed to collaborate with Mams on ‘Girl Gotta Girlfriend.’”

“Mams raps like a boxer, because he is one. He meditates, escapes to retreats and practices mixed martial arts, a combination of jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and boxing. ‘I think mixed martial arts is really spiritual,’ says Mams, ‘because it forces you to be present or else you're going to get knocked out.’”

The page named his debut album as Persona Non Grata, with collaborations including Snoop Dogg, Good Charlotte, T-Pain, Travis Barker and Robbie Williams, and linked out to mamstaylor.com and myspace.com/mamstaylor.

The Official Rules

Unlike the label-drafted rules on the Jive and Epic contests, these were Jamglue's own template: shorter, plainer, and with Jamglue itself as a named sponsor. Section 1 gives the company's address as 1919 Biltmore St. NW #2, Washington, DC 20009, alongside Mams Taylor's management in Century City. Judging, section 10: “Mams Taylor will listen to the entries and personally choose one (1) Grand Prize winner. The Five (5) Runners Up will be the five (5) Remixes with the most votes, determined by the number of Jamglue users who called the Remix ‘A Favorite.’”

One tell that the template was reused: section 6 licenses each entry to “Jamglue, Asylum, Artist and other users of the Website.” Asylum Records had nothing to do with this contest; the name is left over from an earlier one and was never taken out.

The Skin

Each contest got its own stylesheet. The Mams Taylor skin painted the page a dark brown, #381a09, and centered this backdrop behind the 760px content column, with the copy sitting in semi-transparent boxes on top of it.

Sources