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 on Jamglue, from October 2008. Recovered from Jamglue's own static image bucket.
The Natasha Bedingfield “Angel” Remix Contest
On October 13, 2008, Jamglue and Epic Records opened the multitrack session for Natasha Bedingfield's “Angel” to anyone who wanted it. Seven stems went up next to the official contest mix, the community voted the field down to twenty-five finalists, and Bedingfield picked the winner herself. The prize was unusual: not a check, but a phone call from her.
Two captures of the same URL, one from the day after launch and one from long after the results went up, are what this page is rebuilt from.
About the Contest
“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Angel’ by Epic Records recording artist Natasha Bedingfield.” The four steps, quoted as they read on October 14, 2008:
Enter the contest by creating your own copy 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 to create your own version of the song.
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. The 25 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!
How the judging worked. The official rules spelled out the two-stage structure: “All entries will be judged by the public to determine the top 25 finalists. These finalists will be determined by the number of Jamglue users who called the remix ‘A Favorite,’ subject to contest eligibility. All finalists will subsequently be judged by Natasha Bedingfield on the basis of the following criteria: originality (25%), creativity (25%), concept (25%), and presentation (25%).” Winners were to be selected on or about November 24, 2008. The sponsor was SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, 550 Madison Avenue, New York.
The Materials
“Here's what you have to work with.” The contest page listed the official contest mix plus seven separate tracks:
| Angel - Contest Mix | the starting point |
| Lead Vocals - Angel | not recovered |
| Bg Vocals - Angel | not recovered |
| Drums - Angel | not recovered |
| Bass - Angel | not recovered |
| Strings - Angel | not recovered |
| Harp Guitar - Angel | not recovered |
| Synth - Angel | not recovered |
Unlike the 2007 T-Pain contest, none of this audio has turned up in any crawl: no Wayback capture of the stem files, nothing left in the S3 buckets. The track names above are all that survives of the session.
Licensing. This one was not Creative Commons. The rules granted entrants a bare permission to “reproduce, edit, publicly perform and create derivative works of” the Sony BMG content in order to make a remix, and took a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license back over whatever the entrant made with it.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be chosen by Natasha. The winner will get a phone call from Natasha, their remix featured on Natasha's MySpace, and an autographed poster. The Runner Up remix will get an autographed Natasha poster.”
The rules put the estimated combined retail value of the prizes at one hundred dollars. The contest's official name says what it was really selling: “REMIX ANGEL AND WIN A CALL FROM NATASHA.”
The Deadlines
| Oct 13, 2008 | The entry period opens at 10:00 p.m. ET. |
| Oct 14, 2008 | The Wayback Machine catches the live contest page: 66 entries created so far. |
| Oct 25, 2008 | DJ Choppercat posts the contest to his remix blog, one of the few outside mentions that survives. |
| Nov 23, 2008 | Entry deadline and voting deadline, 11:59 p.m. ET. |
| Nov 24, 2008 | Winners to be selected, per the official rules. |
| Apr 3, 2010 | The last archived capture of the page, months before Jamglue shut down, still showing the results. |
Winners
The contest page was rewritten with the results once Bedingfield had listened. Two mixes were named, and both lines below are quoted from the archived results page.
Grand Prize Winner
Angel Uptempo Club (Official) Contest by mestizo_beats
“This was Natasha's favorite!”
Runner Up
Angel - Contest Mix (copy) Prod By INfect by CTY
“Natasha also wanted to recognize this runner up.”
What survives: two names, two titles, and the sentence Natasha's people wrote next to them. The audio does not. Jamglue put mix downloads behind a sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files, and neither remix has been found anywhere else. Whether the phone call happened is not in the public record either.
About Natasha Bedingfield
The label bio that ran on the contest page, in the register of late-2008 pop marketing: “With a number 1 single in America, a number 1 UK debut album, and over 6.5 million units shifted worldwide, Natasha Bedingfield is the UK's biggest female pop star bar none.” It noted that “Unwritten” had been the most played song on mainstream American radio in 2006, that Prince had invited her to jam at a private party, and that Bono had enlisted her for the (RED) campaign.
“I want to make music that matches who I am. My first album was about independence and opportunism. I'm still very independent and I find it hard to let go of that freedom, but I'm in a different place now. I've been dating, searching for a partner, looking for Mr Right...”
Natasha Bedingfield, quoted in the bio on the Jamglue contest page
“Angel” came from N.B., which the bio credits her with co-writing and co-producing alongside Mike Elizondo, Adam Levine, Greg Kurstin, Steve Kipner, Andrew Frampton, Wayne Wilkins, Danielle Brisebois, Wayne Rodrigues and Pat Leonard.
The Page Skin
Every Jamglue contest got its own skin: a banner, a background painting, and a stylesheet that repainted the whole site in the artist's colors for the length of the campaign. Here is the background art that sat behind this one.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/natashabedingfield the day after it opened: the description, the four steps, the deadlines, the seven stems, the prizes, and the entry count.
The same URL after judging, with the Grand Prize and Runner Up, the artist bio, and the complete official rules. This capture is the source for both winners.
DJ Choppercat's remix blog, still online: a link and a screenshot of the contest page. Not a write-up, but independent evidence of the contest circulating outside Jamglue.
static.jamglue.com
The banner and background art on this page, pulled from Jamglue's own image 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