So the Spitfire Audio Westworld scoring competition went well... there's a riot going on in the YouTube comments ;-)

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

and timpani wank.

I thought she’d retired

[Dirtgrain]

I should add that the winner's music is well done and compares well with the competitors. Congratulations to him. It's just the chip tune stuff that struck me as off. Are some of the melodies borrowed, as well?

In case you missed it, a burn on the Westworld scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXK6iJmsM-Y

[empphryio]

There are laws that must be followed when a company does a competition for advertising purposes. I wonder if the entire competition being fake is legal? They are claiming they listened to all 11,000 entries. People can see from their YouTube stats that they didn't actually listen.

[WatchTheGuitar]

There are laws that must be followed when a company does a competition for advertising purposes. I wonder if the entire competition being fake is legal? They are claiming they listened to all 11,000 entries. People can see from their YouTube stats that they didn't actually listen.

Those were probably the most troubling comments although one bit of wiggle room is it doesn’t register as a play if they play less than 30 seconds so they could just say there were so many entries that if they weren’t grabbed in the first few bars or the frame rate was wrong they have a valid get out.

[machinesworking]

My next door neighbor when I did the whole warehouse artist thing was the illegitimate son of the founder of Costco. He was head of the candy division and claimed that no one knew that he was related to the owners ... This is a similar case IMO. Normally there are clauses in these sorts of contests about relations or work associates not being eligible for the contest in the first place. Any sort of contact with a judge should have disqualified him from competition, because there's no way to know how much of an influence that had.

A scenario that seems likely is they all noticed this one, because of the chip tunes, then Abrams finding out he was a peon who worked under him at one time clouded his perception.

[WatchTheGuitar]

My next door neighbor when I did the whole warehouse artist thing was the illegitimate son of the founder of Costco. He was head of the candy division and claimed that no one knew that he was related to the owners

Please tell me he was six years old at the time.



And wore a top hat and monocle.

[vurt]

oi

[MadDogE134]

it is sad when you can't trust the judges. last contest i participated in had 3 winners... 1st,2nd and 3rd. they also listed six honorable mentions. what was bad... the 3rd place winner was far superior to the 1st and 2nd place winners and 4 out of the 6 honorable mentions were as good if not better than the 3rd place winner imo. (myself not being one of them lol) i know this is a subjective thing but everyone i spoke to after.. and NOT mentioning my opinion... all told me the same thing that most of the honorable mentions were better than the winners. so consensus dictates that the judges were on average off the mark in quality and judging performance. you have to take the good with the bad in these things... but never expect to get an appropriate outcome. add to that if there are thousands of entries and they come to a conclusion in a week or less you can pretty much guarantee they didn't listen to them all... but common sense also dictates that if they were put off initially on the ones they DID listen to they went on to the next entry immediately. most of these contests are just to get mailing addresses in the first place or to try and sell a course or something. just enjoy mixing and practice fighting a deadline. if you do them just for the prizes you are gonna be disappointed. cheers

[pinki]

nm

[machinesworking]

My next door neighbor when I did the whole warehouse artist thing was the illegitimate son of the founder of Costco. He was head of the candy division and claimed that no one knew that he was related to the owners

Please tell me he was six years old at the time.



And wore a top hat and monocle.

32 and bald, played in a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

[JerGoertz]

Oh boy, so Spitfire announced a high profile competition where they were going to give everyone the chance to add their own music to a 4 minute video taken from a real episode of the HBO series Westworld with sound and FX and the winner would win a copy of 'everything' that Spitfire Audio puts out, about a £12K prize IIRC.

They announced the winner tonight on YouTube. They had 11,000 entries.
The winning entry contains a lot of 8-bit chiptune (and personally I kind of liked it) and is a guy who has a lot of big name credits including working with JJ Abrams who just happens to an Exec Producer on Westworld.

This has not gone down well with a lot of the other 10,999 people who entered.

Apparently Spitfire's Instagram about it has disabled comments and people have been saying that Spitfire are deleting comments from the YouTube page too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsi7wP024J4

Lawdy, that was hilarious! Halfway expected to see Pac Man swoop in at the last moment.

[Dirtgrain]

32 and bald, played in a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZHWy6W00oM

[re.mark]

What I've found interesting is Spitfire's response in the wake of what is quite a monumental PR disaster.
Alot of people (who did and didn't enter) seem to feel a degree of disappointment for many different reasons, be it they feel their submission wasnt considered, or just underwhelmed by the final result. Within hours Spitfire, a fairly refutable company, clearly didnt like the reaction of these people and took to censoring the response, deleting comments, turning off the Like/Dislike counter and then turning off comments across their social channels.
For a digital company that bases the vast majority of it's marketing presence online and relies on subscribers, they're telling their customer that their opinion doesnt matter, that they're not valued. That's dangerous terrority.
Then within 12 hours one of the CEOs had taken to youtube to post a fairly condecending rant with disdain about the reaction, accusing thousands of Spitfire's followers of dogma.
At this point in time it looks like they taking the stance that they're better off without a huge chunk of their subscribers. The Head of PR there will no doubt be organising a few crisis meetings this week, it'll be interesting to see how they respond to try migitage damage.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Yeah, there's a reason companies use reputation management services. Spitfire could really double down on the foot shooting if they're not careful. Send all those entrants X% off vouchers or something to try and right the ship.

[AnX]

was the whole thing a joke then? cos the winner was fuckin terrible, not even funny really...