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, August 2007.
The T-Pain “Bartender” Remix Contest
In August 2007, Jamglue and Jive Records put the multitrack session for T-Pain’s “Bartender,” featuring Akon, on the open web. Eight studio stems went up under a Creative Commons license, anyone could copy the official contest mix into the Jamglue Mixer, and T-Pain picked the grand prize winner himself. In the two weeks after the audio went live, more than 450 entries had been started; by the end of August the contest page counted 595.
The page below is rebuilt from the archived contest page and the Jamglue blog. The eight stems survived too, so the centerpiece of the original contest still works: you can load them and mix.
About the Contest
The archived contest page laid out four steps. Quoted as they read on August 30, 2007:
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 blog announcement made the point of the thing explicit: this was the contest where Jamglue pushed people to sing and rap, not just to chop beats.
“For this contest, though it is a standard remix contest, we are encouraging fans to record and include their own vocals in their remixes. After all the excitement of the R. Kelly ‘Double Up’ contest, who can resist contributing a verse of their own?”
Divya Bhat, “T-Pain Contest Launches!”, the Jamglue Blog, August 22, 2007
The Materials
“Here’s what you have to work with. Knock yourself out!” The contest page listed the official contest mix plus eight separate tracks:
| Bartender: Contest Mix | the starting point |
| Bartender: T-Pain Lead Vocals | recovered |
| Bartender: Hook Vocals | recovered |
| Bartender: Ad Libs (Echoes) | recovered |
| Bartender: Akon Vocals | recovered |
| Bartender: Keyboards | recovered |
| Bartender: Percussion | recovered |
| Bartender: Strings and Synth | recovered |
| Bartender: Bass | recovered |
All eight stems were pulled back off a November 2008 Wayback crawl of cache.jamglue.com and are what the mixer plays today. The combined contest mix itself is not archived; the mixer starts you with the eight stems instead.
Licensing. The official rules stated that the tracks were “licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license (and that all rights that are not expressly granted under this license are reserved by Zomba Label Group),” and that entrants must attribute T-Pain and Zomba Label Group, for example “Remix using elements from T-Pain/Zomba Label Group,” without implying endorsement. Entries themselves had to be published under the same CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 license.
The Prizes
T-Pain chose the Grand Prize Winner himself, and his favorite remix was to be turned into a ringtone by Jive Records. The Grand Prize Winner and five First Prize Winners each received a signed copy of T-Pain’s album Epiphany.
The official rules put numbers on it: one Grand Prize, consisting of the ringtone release plus one autographed Epiphany, approximate retail value $15.98; and five First Prizes of one autographed Epiphany each. The five First Prizes went by vote count, “the number of Jamglue users who called the remix ‘A Favorite’”; the Grand Prize was the artist’s pick.
The Deadlines
| Aug 6, 2007 | The audio elements go online at 1:00 a.m. PT; the entry period opens. |
| Aug 22, 2007 | The blog announces the contest: over 450 entries started already. |
| Aug 30, 2007 | The Wayback Machine takes its one snapshot of the contest page: 595 entries created so far. |
| Sep 23, 2007 | Entry deadline, 11:59 p.m. PT. |
| Oct 7, 2007 | Voting closes. |
| Nov 15, 2007 | Last date to request the winners list by email, per the official rules. |
| By Feb 2008 | The contest page is rewritten with the results. The March 20, 2008 capture shows 1,443 entries created in total. |
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” The contest page was rewritten with the results once judging finished, and that version was archived. Ten mixes were named: one Grand Prize picked by T-Pain, five First Prizes decided by popular vote, and four honorable mentions that T-Pain called out as runners-up to his favorite. Every name and title below is taken verbatim from the March 20, 2008 capture of the contest page; each mix links to its own archived page where one survives.
Grand Prize
“This was T-Pain’s personal pick! The remix will soon be turned into a RINGTONE and featured on T-Pain.net and T-Pain’s MySpace. b166b1zz will also receive an autographed Epiphany ablum! Congratulations, b166b1zz!” 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!”
| Bartender Ft. Alta | Alta |
| Bartender - Contest Mix [copy] | lilcapone8510 |
| Bartender Ft. UveE, Akon | Uvee90 |
| T-Pain (ft. Kaliber) - Bartender (Contest Remix) | Kaliber714 |
| T. Pain - Bartender Remix ft. Kanye West & R. Kelly | bigBerd |
Honorable Mention
“T-Pain also chose the following remixes as runners up to his fave, so we wanted to recognize them. These talented MC’s and producers will win Jamglue t-shirts.”
| Bartender - Contest Mix feat. THE ESSENCE OF LIFE | es_class |
| Semaj - Qualified Bartender Contest ReMix | Semaj2u |
| Bartender-Remixed From Scratch | myway |
| SUPER HYPHY Bartender - Contest Mix [copy] | selbeatz |
What survives: the names, the titles, and for nine of the ten a mix page in the Wayback Machine. The winning audio does not. Jamglue put mix downloads behind a sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files, and none of these remixes has been found anywhere else. What you can still hear are the eight source stems the entrants started from.
Start Mixing Now
The original “Start Mixing Now!” button opened the Flash mixer with the contest mix loaded. Both of these do the same job today, with the recovered stems: a Web Audio recreation that runs natively, and the original 2007 SWF running under Ruffle.
The recovered audio is re-encoded to mono for the web, so the panning controls are something you do rather than something the files already did.
Sources
jamglue.com/contests/tpain while the contest was live: the description, the deadlines, the materials list, the prizes, the entry count, and the full official rules.
The same URL after judging, with the Grand Prize, First Prize and Honorable Mention winners. This capture is the source for every name on this page.
“T-Pain Contest Launches!” by Divya Bhat: the vocals angle, the entry count, and the ringtone prize.
“And the winner is…”: the fall 2007 winners round-up. It covers six other contests and skips T-Pain, whose results only ever appeared on the contest page itself.
The eight stem files, crawled off Jamglue’s own audio cache and now playing in both mixers.
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