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Hi all,

I've just come back from NOVA which was fun and great - I did want to pitch it to the crowd about an experiment we tried, notably splitting Streaming Music into Dancefloor and Instrumental categories.

The definition was intentionally loose, but essentially should be fairly logical:

- Dancefloor Streaming Music is for music that is dancefloor driven - breaks, four-to-the-floor, house, drum and bass, trance - whatever.

- Instrumental Streaming Music is for music that is non dancefloor - it could be ambient, folk, prog rock, cinematic, acapella. My definition didn't exclude vocals, it was just a distinction from obvious dance music.

It's a common pattern with streaming music competitions that bombastic productions hog the top spots and I feel sometimes more subtle tracks don't get a fair chance. I feel this worked out as our winning entries in both categories were pretty outstanding, and plus I feel it encourages participants to have more creative range and options to submit entries without feeling the need to do crowd pleasing.

It was cool for us! If you're running a party or competition, I'd recommend considering doing something similar if you can.

-Ruairi

(P.S. If this has been done before, fair play!)

Various Finnish parties come to mind. I think at Assembly it's called Dance Music and Listening Music.

Well then, this is cool.

Cache parties used to do this ("new-wave"/"classical")

Although you CAN dance to prog rock (and enjoy it, too!) ;)

All dutch parties did this in the late nineties. "House" and "normal" music compo they'd call it, as we all know that house is not music.

this has indeed been done before: takeover 2001 had exactly this kind of split ("upbeat" vs "chillout" or sth).

I like the idea.

I'm also a friend of having themed streamed music compos (trap, polka, orchestral, acapella, death metal, extratone, unicorns, you name it).

Assembly's only done it since 2012. I think the first party in Finland to do it might've been Stream in 2005.

The only music compo should be Streaming Polka.

My first thought is "heeeeelp, do we really need more compos on parties?".

Then again I very much like the idea of having themed competitions than just a general streaming compo. No matter if it's Polka, Country or whatever. For the sake of the competitive spirit, I'd very much prefer that to see what people come up with.

But please not more than 1 mp3 based music compo on already compo-laden Events.

TRSAC's acid compo is lovely too!

The brilliance of Stream's distinction* between "Listening" and "Dance" imo was that Dance Music was always the last or one of the last compos, right before or after the final demo compos, and incorporated mixing the entries into one relatively continuous piece. In addition to that actual live visuals and, lights, people dancing their asses off... best music compos ever.

(*on the Stream parties I went to anyway, so since 2010.)

See TRSAC - Acid Music Compo for how it's done right :)

i always feel in the tracked music category that i'm competing with a lot of Jungle and House music and whatever but i'll keep doing my cheesy flumps music anyway!

maybe next year i'll enter streaming music as well.

Yeah I was reminded about that one too just after posting ;)

I miss the KG gabber compo :/

could just ask participants to select a genre for their entries and then use Vector Quantisation to reduce to the required number of categories once all the tracks are in.

I dunno, I feel this is more of a perception than anything else. I don't know what you'd define as "subtle", but I see no reason why subtle tracks wouldn't win if they were good enough. I have absolutely no doubt that something like the tune Hunz made for Ceasefire by FLT would be a serious contender in any music compo.