State Your Favorite Underrated Track

hehe, I do bother to read these forum pages :)
(to those who dont know, I'm the richard Wade addressed)

I guess I could probably do a stand-up brainstorm of 45minutes on the topic you are discussing here, but sometimes it is also enlightening to sit and watch opinions.

In a nutshell, my view on "shelf life on wikiloops" can be summed up as follows - and please excuse me if I will take a stand to "defend" the loops a bit:

1. I'm not sure if any discussion will lead somewhere - the amount of interest in tracks is not expandable by making changes to the platform, exept thru attracting more listeners & commenters.
With every track uploaded to wikiloops, the "competition" for listeners gets a bit harder and the shelf life a bit shorter - that's just math.
If users expect more feedback than they are willing to give to others, the whole system will not work, and there is plain nothing you can do about this on the platform design end.

There is places out there that would work with rulesets like "You have to review ten tracks before you can upload your next one", but I really do not believe in that kind of forced interaction- even tho some may feel delighted to see more copy-pasted "very good!" comments... we don't want to go there, do we?

2. Let's not forget - this is the internet, and yes, we are acting as web publishers the moment we upload content to any platform.
You do not have to deal with this aspect to have fun here, but before complaining about your contents' shelf life, please do invest some time in understanding what you yourself can do to increase it.
If your tracks do not have any keywords/tags attached and lack a description text that would attract people using the text search, don't blame the platform if your tracks do not get found easily.

So much being said, I furthermore believe that any attempt to increase shelf life will have a downside to it. Featuring one track/artist/album is always equivalent to not featuring all other tracks...
I hate to say it, but I do not believe that there is any place out there on the internet where thousands of interested listeners are waiting for our uploads.
Look at shelf-life on Youtube or FB - and lets be happy we have WL with some like-minded musicians who actually care about music...
I know there is a lot of sites out there that will tell you: "Become our premium member, and we will get your music out there to the masses." - with the major incentive to forward your track to land on spotify... where it will probably have a tiny shelf-life, if you do not care to "boost" it with some sort of payed "featured track" campaign... good cash being made out of your need for attention, that is.

As it is on WL today, you can't buy that sort of extra attention here.
All you can do to increase shelf life and attention to your work is simple & social:
1. Decorate your track with search-worthy tags and a good title
2. post good quality tracks only, build up a group of followers
3. be a nice fellow, give thumbs and write funny or valuable comments - people will visit your tracks and check them out for sure.
4. remix some fresh tracks - if you help out on others tracks, they will help you out as well (if the tracks you remix are very old, the suppliers may not be active any longer! Important hint for Gwenrann-V here)
5. dont spam your followers by posting 8 tracks a day. You'll see your list of followers get shorter if you do that a lot.


I absolutely agree with Niltons observation that certain features do not make sense any longer, once a certain size of the community is reached. That's why you wont find the "latest submissions" prominently on Youtube, that list would be out-dated the second you have loaded it.
Since the oldest track which is shown on the wikiloops homepage in the "latest jams"-List is close to two hours old (I just had a look), it had quite a lot of "fame" in that list and will stick around some longer on the "latest jams" search results page... no need to change that list so far, I'd conclude.


I wouldn't want to miss Slims initial call, so:
#27369 is one of those tracks which I secretly celebrate a lot :)

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Wikiloops is without question the very best jamming site online and I think all would agree ! I personally think the thumbs system is a big problem as it turns the site into a competition ! But saying that it is very hard to come up with an alternative it is very obvious that those people that have been here the longest or perhaps add a lot of people hopping they will add back in order to get more likes ! I tend not to add many others these days as it gets very hard to listen to all the adds ! The problem of cause with this is I also miss out on hearing a lot of very talented new musicians ! It is selfish I guess but I tend to only add people now that join in jams with me and even then it is so hard to keep up and comment on all the great tunes ! It would be nice to have a magic wand but they are hard to find ! I guess the answer is just do your best ! But yes I think the thumbs system looses us a lot of good musicians that just think no one likes their music

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Dick, great reply...the best advice you gave is give some love if you want some back. I agree 100%. I use to be a SoundCloud member, and let me tell you...zero shelf life, zero likes etc! unless you are a known artist. So the loops is the best...One thing Lairdy, maybe you have to clean out your follower list, many people are not active anymore, then you could add some new people...I think the best thing though is to find some musicians you like to jam with...and the thumbs will come.

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Rp3 yes that is a good idea I have done that before a few times as I don't want to many to follow ! But I still like to see what new stuff is being put up by others as well I just don't think we need a like system ! It is pretty easy to tell if people like it by the amount of plays and downloads ! Something I found disturbing recently was I came across a template that had 13 thumbs over 2000 plays and over 80 downloads and that just doesn't make sense ! To me the the best compliment you can get is if another musician jams with you ! Thumbs mean nothing in the big scheme of things ! Having said that I know we all like to get them .

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Hmmmm, no thumbs, Imagine no thumbs...Lennon would be happy with your idea. It actually makes sense, plays and jams mean a lot more...the likes make for a bit of superficial fun...lets see if Dick has anything to say about this...

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I have proposed a change of the rating system [url=http://www.wikiloops.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=966] Here [/url]

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... and I just gave my two and a half cents on this in Niltons post :)

Doing away with the thumbs? Sure, they are not that relevant in the rating system anyways (see niltons linked post).
But -
what kind of attitude would forbid an act of encouragement and positive feedback?
Seriously, imagine going to a concert and being asked not to applaud if you like the show... that is a bit strange-feeling to me.
Besides that, the click on a thumbs-up button works pretty much across all language borders, and if you don't happen to know how to write witty comments in english, clicking on the button is the best you can do to say "thank you".

I believe "Don't compare yourself with others" ranks among the top 5 of "how to be a happy human", to do away with the thumbs button would be the wrong action to achieve that in my humble opinion :)

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Dick, as usual you make very good points.

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Really interesting discussion and as a relative newbie to the site and not playing so long I personally like the thumbs up and feels great when someone who is a better musician gives some recognition for what I have played. I use the site because I like to play and learn and the advice and encouragement has moved my playing a lot in the lsat three months (my viewB))

Gwennrann's suggestion on the "random filter" I would agree with or a search between song numbers as a third option. As some of the other comments I really like finding tracks which are buried somewhere and the most popular or date sort does not bring up those tracks so easily. Know you are always looking for improvements Dick :)

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Hey!
Let me point you guys towards two possible ways to "go stumbling" you may not be aware of - they are quite close to "random" in their effect, so I feel they may suit your needs :)

1st, you can dial up any number between 312 (oldest jam which is still online) and 62800 (just up a few minutes ago) in the search field displayed in the top-right corner,
and it will take you to the jam with that ID right away (if the track with that ID is not a private band jam and has not been removed for some reason).

2nd, once you landed on any tracks page, there are the two small up and down arrows appearing next to the "GO!"-button in the top-right search panel -
you may easily skip thru the database with those, they follow the track ID chronology, so they are excellent to use to browse down the latest jams, or certain "ages" of the wikiloops history without going back and forth between search results and jams - and both options are 100% free of any rating systems influence.

Hope you'll have some fun with that :)

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Let me start of by saying no matter what, the Loops is still the best thing on the web. These are all 1st world problems. So thanks so much Dick. Now, one thing being overlooked that could potentially solve some of this stuff has recently been created: the album. So far I don't think the album has been utilized to its potential. The top album has 29 thumbs, that's not so much. I think if people would start to listen to the albums, see what people want to feature; it would be a great place to discover good songs and check out the remix tree. While your at it drop a few thumbs. I do believe the album was created to slow things down a bit. But I have noticed 90% of the thumbs I have received on my albums are from those who are featured on it. This says to me people aren't browsing the albums yet. I think if they would start to do this, the Loops would be even better than it already is.

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Heyhhh....
this is a very strange thread: It is dedidated to the theme:
"State Your Favorite Underrated Track"
Till now, this thread has 32 posts /(This one not yet counted.)

I see only 4 clear answers to this appearantly simple query:

#55314 with 9 thumbs out of 187 listeners
#42259 with 15 thumbs out of 253 listeners
#16027 with 10 thumbs out of 621 listeners
#27369 with 28 thumbs out of 570 listeners

The reason for this lame feedback may be, that you did not yet clarify, how to define "rating", how to define the evaluation of an "appropriate rating".
So we should clarify this firstly.
I propose to use the following formula:
Relative rating:
RTL:= T/L, (RTL= Time-Less-Rating, T = Thumbs, L = Listeners)

Basing on this formula we have 4 nominated underratings betweem 0,016 and 0,048.

We could complicate the calculation by considering that the thumb-frequency decreases with an increasing age of the track and that it increases with the number of followers andsoonandsoon......
There is enogh space for a dissertation.

However:
; my favorite underrated track is the one which I am currently playing with. It has just one listener (me) and no thumbs (RTL=0)

But now seriously:

Let's come together to make music!

Music should be a cooperation without competition.
A thumb is just a hug (and a comment is a big hug), but every hug is unique & valuable and, most important: it stands for itself ... and it is no currency.

I hope, nobody will feel offended.

Thank you
will_C

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