Audio portal headed for the worst?

[bladerunner627]

I'm not sure if people have noticed or even if there's been a thread on this recently but it's seems to me that the audio-portal is experiencing a huge downfall.

I've been an NG member since '03 and part of the audio portal since it's infancy. I've been producing tunes since around that same time, granted I'm not the greatest producer on here by any means I think I hold some credibility to some small extent.

Besides the 2007 redesign the audio, in my humble opinion has been having a steadily decline in just about every area. I'm not talking about the 0 bombing (though that's just a testament to how flawed the audio portal is) because honestly the ratings don't matter to me. The reviews are the only thing that hold value among this mess and lately I and SEVERAL others have been getting little to none. I admit, I'm not the most active person among the forums and NG in general but what can I say I'm a busy college student, I do what I can. Unfortunately it seems as though that the people that DO get the most reviews and such are those that are really active in the community, and trust me if I had the time I would be too.

Before all this I obtained a handful of reviews even though my scores were fairly mediocre, but lately it seems like the ONLY way to receive a review or two is to have a high score, hence we're faced with a double-edged sword. Even the worst of Flash Portal submissions get way more reviews (save for those that get blamed).

I'm not going to sit here and propose in detail a bunch of possible solutions because I'm sure many of you guys have already suggested it, and yes it has to do with revamping the scoring system. The situation's not getting any better, in fact it's gotten drastically worse and the time for change is rapidly approaching.

Sincerely,
Bladezor

[Back-From-Purgatory]

TL;DR Version:

"I'm not getting lots of reviews, therefore the AP is dying."

Oh, how you are so very wrong. The AP isn't taking a turn for the worst, it's simply becoming more and more active, meaning there are more and more artists which ends up spreading the reviews pretty thin.

And having a high score is far from the only way to get reviews. Try reviewing other peoples work and asking the same in return, or asking people that have fav'd you or some of your songs to check out your latest work.

You can't expect people to just come to you, you have to go to them.

[PeterSatera]

Pizza hut come to me.

[eatmeatleet]

It would be nice to have some more arranged events or competitions, that's why I joined NG.. But this place is kinda empty, not much changes if you check every day

[loansindi]

At 1/4/10 06:08 PM, eatmeatleet wrote: It would be nice to have some more arranged events or competitions, that's why I joined NG..

So arrange some. Proactivity is not a bad thing.

[Prodigal]

I like ranting about the NGAP as well, lololoolol

[Khuskan]

No, OP is correct. 99% of what gets through sucks so hard that it makes me cry when I have to click the 'approve' button.

Also, the ratio between people uploading songs and people listening/voting/reviewing is terribly skewed that most tracks get completely buried after they're off the 'new uploads' list.

[TheLameChildren]

At 1/4/10 07:19 PM, Khuskan wrote: No, OP is correct. 99% of what gets through sucks so hard that it makes me cry when I have to click the 'approve' button.

Woops, I think that was me, my bad

[boney-man]

At 1/4/10 07:19 PM, Khuskan wrote: No, OP is correct. 99% of what gets through sucks so hard that it makes me cry when I have to click the 'approve' button.

LOL

And Bladezor, I agree... but that means it's time to get off NG :D
Well, you know, I mean stop submitting to the Audio Portal. Unless you just need a place to host your songs lol, but you already have webspace for that.

You definitely have the skill... go promote yourself elsewhere. Oh and I must talk to you on MSN about my latest musical venture lol

[Nayhan]

I'm gonna create a collab hopefully in the next month or two, where you have to make a music video for an Audio Portal song. And there would be several collabs for each genre.
If anyone wants to go and start one off then that'd be cool. I reckon it'd boost the traffic to the audio portal and if someone gets Tom to plug it in one of his news posts then it'd be even better :D

[Usernamemyarse]

well, i must say that i dont like what the audio portal has come to (ive been lurking since the beginning) and, theres been a huge lack of respect for other artists...

[Krank]

The audio portal is headed for the best. I've been learning post-hypnotic phrases to plant audio portal betterment ideas in tom fulps subconscious when I finally meet him.

so yeah, the audio portal is in for some upgrades ^.^

[TMM43]

What would help would be if everyone reverted back to how the Audio Advertisement Thread used to be. When you posted an advertisement you were supposed to review the person before you...that at least gave people ONE review.

Something along those lines should be established again. It would help with many of the bitching threads or at least keep them to a minimum.

I'm not trying to get off topic, by making this another "this is how the AP should be" thread, I'm simply saying that something should be done. Because, like khuskan, I cringe when I press approve for some submissions.

[Box-Killa]

I wish the audio portal was like the art portal, where you have to be a signed artist to get your songs featured.

[Box-Killa]

make friends with the people that run request review club, then you will get plenty of reviews, and if you have people that have faved you as an artist, ask them for a review.

[JackRocker]

At 1/5/10 09:50 AM, TMM43 wrote: What would help would be if everyone reverted back to how the Audio Advertisement Thread used to be. When you posted an advertisement you were supposed to review the person before you...that at least gave people ONE review.

this is what i do. i usually review the person before me, and sometimes even 2 or 3 people before me. the only thing is, is it possible to enforce this? even if that rule was made, most people that come through here rarely pay attention to the rules.(as is evident by the multiple advertising threads that pop up every day.)

anyone have any opinions on how we could make this work?

[InGenius]

This problem is two-sided, at best. The reviews you do get come from two opposite sides of the spectrum: fanboys who absolutely love (or despise) everything you do and give not one shred of constructive criticism, or other producers/artists who nitpick everything you do and never even listened to the track in it's whole because they were too concerned with the fact that you used the old i-IV-V-VI progression blah blah blah. Reviews here have no middle ground. There are hardly any "room for improvement, but this was actually very well done". The few that do give these reviews are hard enough pressed to do so 10-20 times a day.

The flash reviews have always had this problem too, but because you are forced to give flash scores for EXP everyday, most users at some point give in and write reviews. Which in turn means that flash gets more reviews per capita, so if we extrapolate the same hit-or-miss chance of getting a decent review across the two portals you'd find that higher volume flash reviews produce more decent, useful reviews from the same % of chance of good reviews. The problem, I think, if that we need to break experience into 4 categories: Flash, Audio, Art, Overall. Make the same 5-a-day requirement across genres so that your EXP doesn't raise if you aren't voting in that genre.

This will hurt for a few months or more as we gain even more 0-bombers coming into the AP to gain their experience, but it'll end up balancing out as it will also bring even more listeners and more chances for reviews from those who have maybe even never stepped into the AP at all because there's no EXP to be gained there. I think that is one issue that can be solved in that we can get more reviews altogether which raises the chances of getting more useful reviews, all things being equal. Sadly, this will never happen. Nor will anything that really "improves" the AP in the eyes of the artists and producers, I think. It's been shown time and time again that there's very little interest from the top in helping us remedy the major issues down here in the AP. Largely, we are support characters that never gained support.

Remember, the AP is merely a tool for Flash artists to use to keep from breaking copyright law for copywritten music...but the powers-that-be have never cracked down hard on flash artists who continue to use copywritten music so most flash artists see absolutely no reason to come down to our end of the Portal and use our services. And those that do and then make money rarely share profits. The problems are myriad for artists on NG, which is why the best artists leave, the mediocre artists stick around until they become the best and then leave, and the trash that would get blammed offsite if the AP were anything like the FP play around until they get bored and then 0-bomb for the next 5 years of their lives, until they turn 18 and work at McDonald's. And it's been that way at least since '06, and it looks like it'll continue that way until at least '16.

[Step]

Well, we just have to put up with it. Newgrounds revolves around flash, and we're just the extra feature that flash artists can use as royalty-free audio to their submissions. You can't really blame the admins: they intended the website to be a flash website, and the audio portal is simply there as icing to the cake, but the cake as a whole is the flash portal, so to speak. If we wanted more exposure, more intelligent reviews and a larger community of active audio artists, we should go to a website where the main thing is audio. Although it would be nice if some changes were made to the AP for the better of it :D.

Also, this belongs in the Zerovoting and Exposure thread, by the way ;).

[Khuskan]

At 1/5/10 02:24 PM, InGenius wrote: Remember, the AP is merely a tool for Flash artists to use to keep from breaking copyright law for copywritten music...but the powers-that-be have never cracked down hard on flash artists who continue to use copywritten music so most flash artists see absolutely no reason to come down to our end of the Portal

Thanks in part to the wonderful DMCA, which practically makes copyright breach impossible unless the copyright holder cries.

[hhhh]

At 1/5/10 09:50 AM, TMM43 wrote: What would help would be if everyone reverted back to how the Audio Advertisement Thread used to be. When you posted an advertisement you were supposed to review the person before you...that at least gave people ONE review.

Something along those lines should be established again. It would help with many of the bitching threads or at least keep them to a minimum.

Not to mention the thread is now so overloaded that everyone drops there song in there and instantly clicks off. Can we just clear the dam thing switch the rules and start over? It would be about time for this.

[nubbinownz]

At 1/5/10 09:13 PM, hhhh wrote:

At 1/5/10 09:50 AM, TMM43 wrote: What would help would be if everyone reverted back to how the Audio Advertisement Thread used to be. When you posted an advertisement you were supposed to review the person before you...that at least gave people ONE review.

Something along those lines should be established again. It would help with many of the bitching threads or at least keep them to a minimum.

Not to mention the thread is now so overloaded that everyone drops there song in there and instantly clicks off. Can we just clear the dam thing switch the rules and start over? It would be about time for this.

Also, regarding the Advertisement thread. It seems like a damned trap to me. It's as if 0 bombers use the thread as a nice little hit list of new songs to watch out for. I've gotten significantly more 0's with my songs that have been posted on the AAThread than the ones that I just sneakily submit without any fanfare.

I've always been a supporter of the AP but even in my year or so here, it's just been a steady decline.

But the truth has been stated, it's a flash website. We're not important. We don't make the site money. The flash artists do. Look at it from a business standpoint. You've got some employees, and then unpaid interns helping your employees. If your employees are having issues you're going to want to get those issues rectified, otherwise your moneymakers are going to start disappearing. If the interns are having issues, you can just get another desperate intern who's going to deal with it. You're not losing anything in the long run.

Sadly enough, we the interns are just going to have to deal with it or leave.

I really only use the AP anymore to post up a random track or two and to let people know when I've got something big going on. Otherwise my stuff goes to "Thesixtyone" " GrooveShark" or various other music sites.

It's a tragedy to say the least, but at this point there's not anything we can do about it. There's no reason to review songs from a listeners viewpoint.

Maybe they could add some kind of reward for reviewing? Some kind of extra experience or achievements or something neat along those lines, to encourage people to review. But unfortunately, as things have gone so far. I don't see that happening

For you artists that are looking for some real feedback, Check out "slicethepie.com" and for a good music site to put your stuff on, complete with very simplified sales methods, "TheSixtyOne.Org" <-- this place is fantastic. They have a wonderful Idea going on that really encourages people to listen to new music. It's setup like a game, with quests and experience and levels but no voting up or down. You can't vote negatively, you instead, get a certain number of " hearts" that you can give out per day, and tracks are scored on how many hearts they have. Since it's not an infinite amount you can give away, they actually mean something.
Maybe that would work. Make it only possible to vote on 5 tracks per day, so that you actually think about which ones you want to vote ? Or some other number.

I don't know. Anyway, that's my .02 :) just thought it'd throw something on here since it's a matter I've always cared about.

[race1]

Hm, that game idea sounds like a good one.

I was thinking that in order to upload a song, a person had to go review another person's song first.

Another idea would be a better designed search engine. For example say a flash artist is looking for a song to use. I can't remember ifthere are tags (I think there are) but aside from searching genres, there could also be a way to search moods like action, sad, happy, excited, scary, relaxed. I mean, one of the reasons AP was put here was for the flash artist to use in their games and/or movies right? So fuurther catigorizing songs into things like that would help them search out things and help the audio artist putting up songs get their songs used in a flash which would get them more publicity as well.

For example, if a flash creator is looking for a song that represents action and they don't really care what musical genre it is as long as it says ACTION to them when they hear it, then using the search that's already here won't be much help I don'tthink.... well that's just my idea.

I must admit though that I don't review as much as I should so I'll try to do that more.

Another good site is acidplanet. They have contests on there all the time.

[Step]

At 1/5/10 09:52 PM, nubbinownz wrote: You can't vote negatively, you instead, get a certain number of " hearts" that you can give out per day, and tracks are scored on how many hearts they have. Since it's not an infinite amount you can give away, they actually mean something.

Hmm, that's very much like the idea I submitted to the Zerovoting and Exposure thread: NG adds this 'recommendations' system, where you can recommend people for Top 5, and once the new Top 5/30 is announced, the voting returns back to normal. That would fix the Zerovoting problem (since 0-bombers mostly care about the Top 5), and if we add experience for voting in the AP, some awards and more updates per week (maybe even a Blam/Protect system which gives us Blam/Protect points and would also filter out the random junk that usually gets submitted to the AP), the Exposure problem would be practically fixed too, since all of those would make the AP gain more popularity.

Still, this is a flash website. If there was anything they could do to upgrade the FP, then they would do it instantly. The AP gets fixed in their free time I suppose...

I mean come on, Audio is so inferior here. Just look at the forum number of the Audio Forum!

[InvisibleObserver]

At 1/6/10 03:10 AM, Supersteph54 wrote:

NG adds this 'recommendations' system, where you can recommend people for Top 5, and once the new Top 5/30 is announced, the voting returns back to normal. That would fix the Zerovoting problem (since 0-bombers mostly care about the Top 5), and if we add experience for voting in the AP, some awards and more updates per week (maybe even a Blam/Protect system which gives us Blam/Protect points and would also filter out the random junk that usually gets submitted to the AP), the Exposure problem would be practically fixed too, since all of those would make the AP gain more popularity.

While I think this is a step closer to a more fair AP voting system, its issue would remain that individuals with a lot of followers would be more subjective to being nominated for top 5 more frequently, where individuals who may be just as skilled but are unknown, have a very steep hill to climb.

Perhaps if some system of experience for AP was given for writing reviews or something, and it was weighted in such a way that time investment on the AP would boost your score. Perhaps rule in something like the whistle status too where if someone simply writes too many useless/abusive reviews, their weight is lessened significantly. This would probably ween out the mass majority of blatant 0 bombers since their status would be significantly low - I don't know the last time I got hit with 0bombs and was left helpful reviews.

[dragon-teenager]

At 1/4/10 05:30 PM, bladerunner627 wrote: I'm not sure if people have noticed or even if there's been a thread on this recently but it's seems to me that the audio-portal is experiencing a huge downfall.

I've been an NG member since '03 and part of the audio portal since it's infancy. I've been producing tunes since around that same time, granted I'm not the greatest producer on here by any means I think I hold some credibility to some small extent.

Besides the 2007 redesign the audio, in my humble opinion has been having a steadily decline in just about every area. I'm not talking about the 0 bombing (though that's just a testament to how flawed the audio portal is) because honestly the ratings don't matter to me. The reviews are the only thing that hold value among this mess and lately I and SEVERAL others have been getting little to none. I admit, I'm not the most active person among the forums and NG in general but what can I say I'm a busy college student, I do what I can. Unfortunately it seems as though that the people that DO get the most reviews and such are those that are really active in the community, and trust me if I had the time I would be too.

Before all this I obtained a handful of reviews even though my scores were fairly mediocre, but lately it seems like the ONLY way to receive a review or two is to have a high score, hence we're faced with a double-edged sword. Even the worst of Flash Portal submissions get way more reviews (save for those that get blamed).

I'm not going to sit here and propose in detail a bunch of possible solutions because I'm sure many of you guys have already suggested it, and yes it has to do with revamping the scoring system. The situation's not getting any better, in fact it's gotten drastically worse and the time for change is rapidly approaching.

Sincerely,
Bladezor

I'm siding with bladerunner on this one. The Audio Portal has been experiencing a huge decline in activity. What's interesting is that in terms of submissions it's as active as ever; now, the people who seem to be leaving are those who reviewed the songs.

On average, I get 1 review per song. Now I'm not complaining; I'm not the most popular artist on here, and that's to be expected. But you could just casually scroll through my submissions and notice a trend. My very first submission here received 9 reviews. The next several received 3 or 4. Just about EVERY 2009 submission got 1 or 2.

My scores have not changed. If anything, I've been getting better scores. And if it's not too bold I'd say I'm a far better producer than I was when I first signed on here. But that has not affected my average review quota. I don't get any reviews anymore.

I definitely think that the audio portal has been on a serious decline. Those of you who just try to turn this into an ego stoke by saying that we're just bitching because we don't get the reviews we want are being silly. I couldn't care less, half of the opinions I hear on this site are the most asinine on the face of the planet. But there's a reason why this site has been holding less and less value to me. Mostly because it's just become a resource for the big shots at the Flash Portal rather than a place to grow and flourish as an artist.

There's not much to be done about this. Personally I'm in favor of removing the "zero" score option, since I don't believe any song deserves that score and people who zero bomb to get off should be banned. But that won't increase the amount of constructive criticism anyone recieves.

[WeHaveFreshCookies]

I experience the same problem with lack of reviews. It kinda sucks, but what are reviews for? To get some good critique so that you can improve. Keeping this in mind, try the Review Request Club. They're great.

But like has been said already, you have to go to them. Start reviewing the recently submitted songs and asking for reviews in return. Advertise in your sig. Advertise on your userpage. Put your stuff out there, and eventually people will notice.

[NOTunowned]

accepting submissions

and its not like your first submissions topped the archetype artist of techno genre, oh wait that would never happen. maybe with 500ugs of owsley and a non-sheep mentality

[Syntrus]

Oh now lets not start threads like this its a new year lets chill and make music for fun. Don't worry about all that shit.

[Krank]

look, the audio portal can't be going downhill. I'm still on it!

[CKC2009]

Hell Yh!! TOTALY AGREE!

Audio Portal sucks cock now... i mean u post somethin up someone gives u couple 5ives then som jerk comes a long a Zero.. jus cos of the genre..

Thats WHy so many producers are leavin this site cos it sucks..i think that they shud only allow a vote if u leave a comment.

That might cut it downa bit..