I think a good way to go about doing early competitions is to have people record them playing a song because that is rather easy to do. You only need a very basic microphone/line in thingy or most MP3 players have some sort of 'record' feature that records .WAV files directly. They're easy enough to be converted to .MP3 files for upload purposes. As long as we agree to be lenient on sound/recording quality in our judgement and focus on the content within then I think that way would get the most submissions. And obviously people who have the capability and the know-how could do more professional recordings as well. But doing it this way then people could upload something that's just one instrument or one instrument and a voice or one instrument a voice and a click track* etc. I know I've explained all this poorly, I'm having a conversation on the phone while I'm typing this.

Also, maybe a good early competition would be to cover another song, probably adding your own twist to it. And to stop people from picking stupid songs no one has ever heard before we could decide on a limited theme (American Standards, Beatles songs, hits from the 70's etc.). That way people can choose for themselves whether to stick to their comfort zones or whether to go balls to the wall and piss on those comfort zones.

Either way, I think that making the entry process as simple as possible will yield the most results. Not everyone has the time to spend hours devising/composing a specific piece and then recording/uploading/whatever. Let's try and keep everyone involved.


*There is a very decent online drum machine here