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, recovered from the static.jamglue.com S3 bucket.
The Perishers “Carefree” Remix Contest
In October 2007, Jamglue and Nettwerk Music Group opened up “Carefree” by The Perishers, a melancholic indie pop band from Umeå, Sweden, whose album Victorious had just come out. Seven tracks went online, the band picked the grand prize themselves, and Nettwerk’s Silent Revolution imprint put up a messenger bag.
It is the smallest field of any contest in this group: 50 entries in all. That is worth keeping in the record next to the 595 that T-Pain drew. A hip-hop remix contest and a Swedish indie pop remix contest were not the same event, whatever the mechanics said, and the archived entry counts are the honest measure of it.
About the Contest
The contest page laid out four steps. Quoted as they read on October 11, 2007, six days after the audio went up:
Jamglue is excited to showcase a remix contest featuring “Carefree” by Nettwerk Records recording artist The Perishers. Here’s how you can participate:
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 First Prize winning mixes are determined by how many people mark them as a Favorite, so break out your address book and encourage your friends to vote for yours!
Win great prizes!
The Materials
“Here’s what you have to work with. Knock yourself out!” The contest page listed the official contest mix plus six separate tracks:
| Carefree - Contest Mix | the starting point |
| Vocals · Carefree | not recovered |
| Background Vocals · Carefree | not recovered |
| Guitars · Carefree | not recovered |
| Drums and Percussion · Carefree | not recovered |
| Bass · Carefree | not recovered |
| Keyboards · Carefree | not recovered |
None of the audio survives. Jamglue put track and mix downloads behind a sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files, and the 2008 crawl of cache.jamglue.com that preserved the T-Pain stems did not cover these.
Licensing. The official rules stated that the tracks were licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license, with all rights not expressly granted reserved by Nettwerk Music Group, and that entrants must attribute The Perishers and Nettwerk without implying endorsement. Entries themselves had to be published under the same CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. The contest was sponsored and run by Jamglue Inc. of Seattle and Nettwerk Music Group.
The Prizes
“The Perishers will personally pick the Grand Prize winner! Their favorite remixer will win a Silent Revolution messenger bag, and the winning remix will be featured on their MySpace page. You and other Jamglue users will vote for 5 First Prize winners! The First Prize winners and the Grand Prize winner get an autographed copy of The Perishers’ latest album Victorious.”
The official rules put numbers on it: one Grand Prize of an autographed Victorious, a Silent Revolution messenger bag, and a feature on the band’s MySpace and website, approximate retail value $198.98; and five First Prizes of an autographed album each, ARV $17.98. The Grand Prize was the band’s pick; the First Prizes went by favorite count.
The Deadlines
| Oct 5, 2007 | The audio elements go online at 8:00 p.m. PT; the entry period opens. |
| Oct 11, 2007 | The Wayback Machine captures the live contest page: 6 entries created so far. |
| Nov 18, 2007 | Entry deadline, 11:59 p.m. PT. “Publish your contest entry by November 18, 2007.” |
| Dec 2, 2007 | Voting closes. |
| By Feb 2008 | The contest page is rewritten with the results. The April 17, 2008 capture shows 50 entries created in total. |
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” The contest page was rewritten with the results, and that version was archived. Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the April 17, 2008 capture; each mix links to its own archived page.
Grand Prize
Carefree - Contest Mix [copy] by amuller
“This was The Perishers’ pick! The remix will be featured on their web site and MySpace. amuller will also receive an autographed Victorious ablum and a messenger bag from Silent Revolution. Congratulations, amuller!” The typo is the original page’s.
First Prize
“Our First Prize winners were chosen by popular vote - congratulations to these winners on their great mixes, as well as their incredible energy that went into in promoting their mixes to collect votes!” The stray “into in” is the original page’s.
| Carefree - Contest Mix [No matter the storm by MagsyB] | MagsyB |
| Carefree --> OFFICIAL <-- Contest Remix | bigBerd |
| Carefree (Careless mix) | djmoon |
| Lars Carefree Mix | Lazaroth |
| Carefree - Contest Mix ADD!!!!!!!!!! | Mixin_Perfection |
djmoon appears three times in the ten most recent entries alone, with a “Careful mix,” a “Careless mix” and a “Skylarking Satellite mix.” The one that took a First Prize was the Careless mix. In a contest of 50 entries, a single prolific remixer went a long way.
What survives: the names, the titles, and an archived mix page for all six winners plus the official contest mix. No audio survives, for the winning remixes or for the seven source tracks.
About The Perishers
“A ceiling two seconds from collapsing, lots of sloppy Doc Marten dancing, and really harsh hardcore music. Ask Ola Kluft his earliest memories of growing up in Umea, Sweden, and he’ll gladly share this DIY-or-die story (or some other basement show fiasco) with a smile and a snicker. Which is quite amusing and a little confusing when you consider Kluft’s current gig: singing sweetly and subtly amid the moonlit, melancholic indie pop of The Perishers.”
The artist bio as it ran on the Jamglue contest page, 2007
The bio went on to note that Sarah McLachlan had handpicked the band to open her 2005 North American tour, guesting on “Pills” every night, which helped them sell “nearly 20,000 copies of Let There Be Morning after just 10 weeks on the road,” and that Victorious was their first record with producer Per Sunding.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/theperishers while the contest was live: the four steps, the deadlines, the materials, the prizes, and the entry count at 6.
The same URL after judging, with the Grand Prize and First Prize winners, the final entry count, the artist bio, and the full official rules. This capture is the source for every name on this page.
static.jamglue.com
The contest banner, still sitting in Jamglue’s original S3 bucket.
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