Votietracks

Interesting discussion over on Anorak about voting for Indietracks in the UK Festival Awards.

"We loved your music festival, but don't want you to win any awards for it."

Its kind of like a kick in the balls.

Ooh, at the weekend there, I was reading the Sunday Telegraph and dozing whilst the wean watched Peppa Pig. There was this review of some album/gig in The Review section, they were reviewing Glasvegas, who almost had a number one album the other week, it seems they're doing remarkably well.

I'm not quite sure what they sound like, I only know them by name cos a few years back in maybe 2004, just after we'd released The Plimptons's debut single, Could I Be Loved, we got on Radio Scotland's 'demo' competition, where people had to vote on the BBC website for which song the liked best, ours or whatever Glasvegas were offering.

On the site, after you voted it showed you what the split of the votes, were, not how many, just the split. So if you voted once, and saw it was 50:50 and then ran to another computer and voted again, and it turned to 33:67 you could reasonably guess there had been only three votes.

And if you ran round and voted on 10 computers in the office and the proportions had then gone to 40:60, then someone else must have voted for the other band seven more times to your twelve.

If you deleted the cookie, you could even vote again on the same computer. But that would be cheating.

So I asked around and spammed the internet. It would have been nice to win the votey thing, and get the track played once or twice on Radio Scotland. Some friends voted, some didn't. Some hadn't heard the song but wanted to do something nice for me, and some people had heard the song and didn't like it so they didn't vote, regardless of whether I wanted to win.

After a day or two, and sampling by voting a few times, and doing calculations, there were only a hundred or so votes for each track. Glasvegas had 55% of the vote, Plimps had 45%.

Then it went up to 65:35, then 70:30 in an hour or so. Do the sums, someone was recording multiple votes.

Time passed and it accelerated, so that it was a few of the Plimp army registering hundreds of votes and a similar number of the Glasvegas army doing likewise.

By the end of it, the mighty Plimp won, with I guess 4,000 votes and Glasvegas lost with about 3,500 votes.

We really wanted to win and get our track played on Radio Scotland, so thats what we did. Glasvegas, they went on to have an album that narrowly missed the number one spot the other week.

And the friends who didn't vote because the didn't like the track or the band, their vote or non-vote made fuck all difference to winning the vote, but the sentiment I asked for a favour which would have cost nothing and they refused, that I carry that with me.

Hmm, that's not quite what I was trying to convey when I started writing this.

Has the moment passed? No, I can still convey it.

I liked Indietracks. I liked it cos of the music, the bands, the people, the trains, how everyone was from a band, a promoter, a fanzine, a website, a friend, someone stood nearby at a gig and all of that. Thats what Indietracks was to me, and I liked it.

And if the chap who ran Indietracks it wants to win an award for his labours then regardless of what I think of the award itself ("Anyone can dish out meaningless awards") then I will vote for that festival.

Thats just me , my bitterness and my sense of loyalty though.