You're looking back in time: Jamglue ran from 2006 to 2010. This page is a retrospective built from the public record.
Quick Links:About the Contest | The Materials | The Prizes | The Deadlines | The Winners That Never Came | Sources
The banner that ran across the top of jamglue.com/contests/wizkhalifa, recovered from the still-live static.jamglue.com bucket.
The Wiz Khalifa “This Plane” Remix Contest
This is the biggest contest we have found anywhere in Jamglue's archives, and the one nobody won. In late November 2009 Jamglue, Rostrum Records, FrankRadio and iHipHop Distribution put four stems from “This Plane” online. Wiz Khalifa had left Warner Bros. that July, was touring hard behind the Flight School mixtape and the How Fly project with Curren$y, and was releasing Deal or No Deal independently. The fanbase showed up.
Two days in, the page counted 151 entries created. Six days in, 486. By January 2 it read 1,864, and the last capture ever taken of it, on April 3, 2010, read 2,508. For comparison, the T-Pain contest of 2007 finished at 1,443 and the GS Boyz contest at 1,207.
Entries closed on December 27, 2009 and voting closed on January 10, 2010. The page then said the same thing for the next three months, straight through to the last capture ever taken of it: “This contest is closed to new entries; stay tuned for winner announcements!” Jamglue went dark in May 2010. So far as the public record shows, the winners were never announced.
No audio from this contest survives, and neither do any winner names, because there are none to recover. What follows is the page as it stood while the contest was live, plus the record of what happened after it closed.
About the Contest
“Jamglue, Rostrum Records, FrankRadio, and iHipHop Distribution are excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘This Plane’ by Wiz Khalifa.” Four steps followed, quoted as they read on November 25, 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!
The Materials
“Here's what you have to work with.” The contest mix plus four tracks. The acapella and the contest mix both carried an [EXPLICIT] tag in their titles. Each track still has an archived page; none still has audio.
| [EXPLICIT] This Plane - Contest Mix | the starting point |
| [EXPLICIT] Acapella - This Plane | page archived, audio lost |
| Drums - This Plane | page archived, audio lost |
| Lead Synths - This Plane | page archived, audio lost |
| Synths - This Plane | page archived, audio lost |
Licensing. Section 5 of the rules put the stems under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, with all rights not expressly granted reserved by the artist, and required the attribution line “Remix using elements from Wiz Khalifa” without implying endorsement.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be personally chosen by Wiz Khalifa. The winner gets their remix featured on iHipHop.com and on Wiz Khalifa's MySpace, as well as a copy of DJ Hero.”
“Five Popular Vote winners will be chosen by the Jamglue community. Each winner gets a prize pack with an autographed ‘Deal or No Deal’ CD and more.”
The rules valued the grand prize at $60.98 and each runner-up pack, an autographed CD plus ten Jamglue stickers and a Jamglue T-shirt, at $34.98. Six prizes were on offer against what became 2,508 entries: roughly one prize per 418 entries.
The Deadlines
| Nov 23, 2009 | The entry period opens at about 8:00 p.m. Pacific. |
| Nov 25, 2009 | First capture of the live page: 151 entries created so far. |
| Nov 29, 2009 | 486 entries created. |
| Nov 30, 2009 | The entries page is crawled: 555 created in all, one week in. |
| Dec 27, 2009 | Entry deadline, 11:59 p.m. Pacific. |
| Jan 2, 2010 | The page is closed to new entries and waiting on winners: 1,864 created. |
| Jan 10, 2010 | Voting closes, 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Under the rules, the five runners-up are now decided. |
| Mar 29, 2010 | Still closed, still waiting: 2,507 created. |
| Apr 3, 2010 | The last capture of this page: 2,508 created, still no winners. |
The Winners That Never Came
Every other contest page on this site ends the same way: the page gets rewritten, “The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” goes up top, and the names follow. That never happened here.
About the Contest
“This contest is closed to new entries; stay tuned for winner announcements!”
The entire body of jamglue.com/contests/wizkhalifa in every capture from January 2 to April 3, 2010.
The Wayback Machine caught the page six more times across those three months, plus once mid-server-error. The sentence never changes. Meanwhile the results for the Mams Taylor and Hopsin contests, both of which closed earlier, did go up and are archived. Something stalled on this one specifically, and then the company ran out of time: jamglue.com went dark on May 5, 2010.
What survives: the brief, the rules, the stem list, the entry counts, and 2,508 remixes that no longer exist anywhere. We have deliberately not filled this section in. If winners were ever notified privately, no trace of it has reached the public record, and inventing one would be worse than the gap.
About Wiz Khalifa
The bio on the contest page, quoted in full. It is a snapshot of an artist mid-climb:
“After leaving Warner Bros. Records in July, Wiz's career has continued to take off independently. This past summer he released a now classic mixtape, ‘Flight School,’ and teamed up with Curren$y for the ‘How Fly’ project. He has toured relentlessly and has continued to connect with his ever-growing fanbase in new and innovative ways.”
“‘Deal or No Deal’ is a new 15-track album that displays Wiz's growth and progression as a world-class MC. Contributing producers include E. Dan, Josh Everette, Ryan M. Tedder, Johnny Juliano and Sledgren. Wiz also enlists Curren$y, Kev Da Hustla, Lavish, and Josh Everette as featured guest artists.”
“Wiz will continue to tour throughout the year with upcoming stops in New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Richmond, Ann Arbor and many additional cities to be announced soon.”
The Official Rules
Headed “JAMGLUE, ROSTRUM RECORDS, FRANKRADIO & iHIPHOP DISTRIBUTION,” these are Jamglue's own eleven-section template. Section 1 lists the sponsors as Jamglue Inc. of Washington, DC and the three partners care of Gadfly Communications Inc., trading as iHipHop Distribution, on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, with the typo “Distrubution” intact. Section 10 sets out the judging: “Wiz Khalifa 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.’ All votes must be cast by 11:59pm Pacific Time, January 10, 2010.” The November 25, 2009 capture has them in full.
The Skin
Each contest got its own stylesheet. The Wiz Khalifa skin took the page to black and set its heading color to #d20024, with this backdrop centered behind the 760px content column.
wizkhalifa_bg.jpg, the page backdrop.
wizkhalifa_homepage.jpg, the tile that promoted the contest on the Jamglue homepage.
Sources
The live page two days in: the description, the deadlines, the four stems, the prizes, the bio and the full Official Rules.
The published entries one week in, out of 555 created in all.
Six days after the entry deadline: “stay tuned for winner announcements,” 1,864 entries created.
The last capture ever taken of this URL while Jamglue was running. Same sentence, 2,508 entries created, no winners.
static.jamglue.com
The contest banner, the page backdrop, the homepage tile and the skin stylesheet, mirrored from Jamglue's original S3 bucket, which is still serving.
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