"Second Chances" - Overlooked Tracks

[Freewave]

Second Chances is a monthly event organized by Brony Musician Directory that sets out to feature all the great music that had been overlooked from each past month.

The idea was born after noticing a lot of outstanding songs with just under a hundred or a couple of hundreds views, from unknown artists that we hope we can give a second chance to. Aside from the above argument, many of the said tracks simply don’t make the cut into Equestria Daily, despite being worthy of some spotlights. By no means we’re trying to say that EqD should showcase everyone; the competition is tough, and only the most unique tracks get up there.

Hence why the Second Chances. We want to show everyone that there are many unknown brony musicians and tracks by them that really deserve attention.

Each month we will be choosing top 20 tracks voted by the community possibly from hundreds of submissions. The voting for the submissions will begin week before each month’s official release.

The qualification criteria for submissions are as follows:

1. Your song must be located on Youtube.

2. Your song must have less than 1,000 views on submission day. It cannot go over 1,500 by the time voting starts.

3. Each musician cansubmit only one track that qualifies. Collaborations are fine but only one artist can make the eventual compilation so no showing up twice or more. You must submit a track that you made, not a friend’s track so that you can pick your one favorite to enter.

4. Must be pony-related and can be from any genre.

5. No copyright conflicts, parodies, or unauthorized third parties.

6. Must be a free release (or “pay what you want” on bandcamp), as we will be also posting entire albums there.

7. The track must not be used in a different (official) brony compilation. If your track was on Balloon After Party, Lesser Knowns, Aviators remix album, or any other event, let’s just say that you’ve had enough exposure and that track does not need to show up on a compilation twice.

8. We will put any entries into a youtube playlist so that you can make sure you have entered, so that others can check out the track, so that people can vote for their favorites.

9. The submissions should be either in 320kbps mp3 initially but will need to be in .wav format if it makes it on to the compilation (for bandcamp). Please note that this does not influence the voting outcome, but only the quality of the songs people will listen to.

10. For the first edition. Submission dates are for tracks with Youtubes from 7/01 to 8/15 (recently extended). People can submit tracks for the next 3 weeks until 9/15 at which point we have a week of voting until 9/21. We’ll need wav’s from any of the winners and we’ll release the comp on 10/1 or before that if we use bandcamp. We want this to be free so we can post a mediafire link if we run out of free downloads for that month,

The next round will start at 9/22 for tracks from 8/15 to 9/15 and follow the same slightly date pattern with the only change being the change of the month

Go to http://bmdsecondchances.tumblr.com/ to read the full rules (should be the same that is in here) and more importantly to submit a track. Please reblog to get the word out! Submissions are now open.

Any other ideas, thoughts, concerns, or rules? Let us know. We want this to be open, fair, and seen as a good thing.

[Kushy Kallous]

Sounds like a pretty good idea, I like second chances.

I make a lot of 'brony' raps, is that pony related?
Mostly stuff about being picked on, or fed up.
I have a good track in mind, which parallels some points with in my own life and a particular character from the show, but it's more a brony-track than a pony-track.

[Freewave]

Tracks about the brony community I would think are welcome. If in doubt just make sure you've explained it in the description on your youtube so that it's clear what it's about and how it applies as pony/brony music.

[LoreRD]

Damn it.... my only pony track in July was a 30 min piano improvisation.
I can't submit that if I understood correctly :/

[Freewave]

agreed. if it makes you feel better i dont think i had anything in july myself that would quality either.

[LoreRD]

Oh well
At least I can vote and listen.

[Hangin' From A Cloud]

I like this idea! Though I don't have anything worth submitting, I'll sure vote and try to spread the word.

[Matthew N.]

Sean and I were definitely thinking of running this on a monthly basis. If what he wrote leaned more towards a one-time thing, then be assured that's not the case. We hope that the initial release will grant us some audience and spread the word around for a bigger community to not only submit their overlooked songs, but also for a greater number of people to vote for their unknown favourites.

The goal of this is to showcase all the great work from every single genre without any exceptions. Even if you don't make the cut to the top "x" of the given month, your submitted song would already be heard by us and everyone else voting.

This is still an idea in its early stage, but we in BMD are definitely leaning towards doing this and will strive to make it work for everyone.

[Freewave]

Good point. I adjusted a few things to reflect that. Obviously we'd like this to take off but most importantly like anything in the community it only works well if people like the idea and actively support it. If people don't submit, listen, talk about, or vote it defeats the purpose and then we're just in the same situation we are always in. That said we'd like to see if we can get tracks from July being the initial setup and see if it takes off from there as a monthly thing. A new month bring about a new month of reflection.

[TheLonging]

8. The digital compilation will be released in early September based off the voting for favorites. CD length (up to 76 min) comp, would prefer all tracks as 320 bit mp3, maximum tracks length of 8 min, and we will tag all music as part of the compilation for release.

You'd need .wav if you want to put it up on bandcamp. Sounds bad otherwise.

EDIT: Also, for the BMD page, can you by any chance remove those desktop ponies? They lag my computer and make scrolling the page annoying and not worth it.

[Freewave]

yeah they may be too taxing. i'll see if we can.

edit: [DONE]

[Matthew N.]

yeah they may be too taxing. i'll see if we can.

Well, we surely can, but it's up to you.

[CollapsingDike]

I'd be happy to participate, where do i submit? On bmd or where?

[UnderpΩny]

I think this is a great idea. I know a lot of musicians who don't get on EqD when they deserve it.

[Matthew N.]

I'd be happy to participate, where do i submit? On bmd or where?

I'll be figuring everything out with Sean hopefully today. We'll update the initial thread and post something to bump it to let you all know exactly "where, what and how."

[Matthew N.]

The official page is up: Second Chances.

We have decided to skip July as there was simply not enough time to get sufficient amount of submissions. We'll go with August, so if there are any songs that were already overlooked by the community, follow the link, read the instructions and await your second chance.

[TheLonging]

Are we submitting the file directly, or a link to the video/soundcloud itself?

If this is going up on Bandcamp, shouldn't we submit .wav's directly, or is this not going to be a Bandcamp thing?

[Matthew N.]

First you submit a youtube video (or rather a link) to your song. Then, if your song is amongst the top-voted tracks, we'll require of you to send us either a high quality mp3 or .wav.

[LoreRD]

Is a Constellations remix "pony" enough? (also, does submitting a track for Aviators' remix contest count as an "official brony compilation"?)

[LFP]

Itn't it going to be up on aviators' remix album?
All the songs which you were allowed to remix are pony songs making it a pony album? which would not allow you to join. Feel free to submit other stuff though!

[Matthew N.]

Itn't it going to be up on aviators' remix album?
All the songs which you were allowed to remix are pony songs making it a pony album? which would not allow you to join. Feel free to submit other stuff though!

Unfortunately for you, LFP is correct. Your song will already get enough exposure if it ends up on Aviators' album, and our goal is to promote music that despite being "fabulous" doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Anything other from August you may have that doesn't have over 1000 views you are welcome to submit!

[Applejinx]

Final rules don't actually specify a month...

Suggested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E7TFe3voMM ...before noticing who was running this thing. oops...

[LoreRD]

Itn't it going to be up on aviators' remix album?
All the songs which you were allowed to remix are pony songs making it a pony album? which would not allow you to join. Feel free to submit other stuff though!

Unfortunately for you, LFP is correct. Your song will already get enough exposure if it ends up on Aviators' album, and our goal is to promote music that despite being "fabulous" doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Anything other from August you may have that doesn't have over 1000 views you are welcome to submit!

That's the point. Only the top 5 remixes, chosen by Aviators and a couple of his friends get on the album, and the've already chosen which ones. I wasn't one of those lucky five, so could I still submit the track?
Also, the current amount of views of it on YouTube is 66.

[Matthew N.]

In that case yes, you're free and encouraged to submit your song. We'd also like to ask anybody for help with help us promote our idea. We'll soon be creating a youtube channel and a promo video as well.

[Freewave]

Yeah I have a pm sent to Matthew to iron out the details of this. While we've run out time for July tracks we'll likely be wanting to cover August. Problem being that August hasn't ended yet and we'd rather not have tracks that were made in the last week of August not be submitted immediately in the first week of September. It's hard to give tracks a second chance when they are still fresh out of the oven. We'll keep you guys posted on what timelines and processes we're going to use. Any opinions and thoughts let us know. Still I hope you like the idea and will help us gain support for it as a community when we've got the details ironed out.