Many people have recently shown an interest in holding new audio contests competitions.
I think that this is exactly the type of thing that the Audio Forum needs but we should all consider consolidating our efforts.
With too many different people holding individual competitions, I think that we may be running the risk of spreading the resources of our community too thin. There are several people and groups that are currently either planning or having various contests and If we work together as a team we can avoid stepping on each others toes.
It's tough to run a monthly competition. Coming up with new and interesting themes is hard enough let alone finding a good team of people to act as judges and coordinators for the whole thing. Many of you have good ideas and I know that you are tempted to get them out there as quickly as possible but I think it would be better to put all of our ideas into a common pool that we can all draw from.
By doing this, we can all take turns coordinating the contests, judging and participating without the stress of having to play the same roles every month. Some of us can work on the MAC (or MrAC, ORM, or any other contest) one month and those that need a break can take one the next.
I think that this will also make all of the contests more interesting because there could be more involvement for each contest. When more than one competition is running at a time, people may not be able or willing to participate in both.
Imagine what would happen if three different camps all announced separate contests within the same week! It's possible that no one contest would draw enough participants to make it really interesting.
I would like to invite any interested parties to join with the MAC crew so that we can make every future contest better.
There are other benefits as well - when the MAC first got started the best we could do was to offer sigpics or links on the front page - things have come a long way since then and now, with Tom's help, we have been able to make better prizes like t-shirts, stickers, cash and games available to both the winners and in some cases the judges too.
By joining together with the current MAC staff, it's more possible that you can also offer similar prizes for your themes. Tom recently let the cat out of the bag on the front page with info about the upcoming "Castle Crashers" themed MAC - this may be an opportunity for some of you to have your music featured in a major game release!
Obviously, I cannot speak for Tom so I can't make any promises but I can say that for the past several MACs, Tom has been very generous with the prizes offered and I would like to think that his support will continue. If participation drops below a certain point or if our efforts are too diluted then it's possible that we may lose some of that support - then we're back to sigpics and links in our signatures as prizes for the winners.
I think it's great when we can get a group of participants together to compete but I think that competition between several contests being run concurrently by different groups of people just isn't the best way to do it.
I'm encouraging all of you to take part and help to coordinate all of the audio contests better - that way the right hand knows what the left one is doing. I believe that this will make our little community a better and more interesting place for everyone involved.
MAC, MrAC, ORC, PAC, etc. - let's all work together and form a series of Unified Audio Competitions !
