For the effort of setting up an anonymous email account, sure. (I’m going to need email contacts for people at some point in the process, regardless.) But that seems like a tool best-suited for when everybody wants to share all the information with everybody else - which isn’t quite what we want, here.
I don’t think it really matters whether folks see each others’ entries in the list…?
Anyway, if you have a downloadable spreadsheet template in tab-delimited format that folks can download and return to you, you’d have a cross-platform solution that ultimately gets you something very close to a single, randomizable spreadsheet…
The only problem I see with this is that it might produce a little bit of sadness/letdown.
“Oh, man, I really wanted to write a game for ‘Eleanor Rigby’, I hope that gets sent to me!”
“Awww, the only song I got that I ever heard of was ‘The Hustle’. And I was all inspired by this other song!”
pick up rice
Done.
wear face
Done.
You have died in the church, scoring 0 out of a possible 0 points! How sad.
(deletes Eleanor Rigby from playlist)
Yet surely each participant’s full playlist is going to be published somewhere, right? That could happen after the finished entries are submitted, though.
I was only thinking of this as a problem if the playlists were published before we each got our assignments. If the playlists aren’t published afterward formally, I imagine everyone will swarm the forum to post their lists.
That’s kind of the trick to it, yes. I originally thought of doing this like Cover Stories, where everything gets put in one big pot and you can take whatever you want - but images you can take in at a glance; songs take time. And then there’s paralysis-of-choice stuff, and the productive discipline of working to constraints.
(And yeah, we can publish the full playlists afterwards.)
Also, I rather thought that getting songs you were unfamiliar with was the point. Why would you send a mix-tape to a friend if it was all songs that they already knew?
YMMV. I plan to listen to everything on the list I receive, but even if they were all songs I knew already, I’d be happy with it. Finding new music isn’t the point for me - it’s the hope that someone will make something cool out of a suggestion of mine, and hoping that I’ll make someone’s day by making something cool out of a suggestion of theirs.
Yeah, this. While I’ve got a few obscure songs on my playlist, most of them fall into the category of “songs by famous bands that you may not have heard”.
Honestly, I’m not sure how many truly classic songs there are, such that you can assume that your unknown recipient has heard them. For example, if you gave me the 8 biggest megahits from the last 10 years of the US pop charts, I wouldn’t recognize 90% of them. Despite being from the US! That’s a part of the musical landscape that I simply ignore.
That’s what’s great about this proposed comp. It will force musical exposure upon all of us. We all know that the lists we get are going to have a slew of songs we’ve never heard of by bands we don’t know. Maybe you’ll discover your new favorite band? (or new least fav, lol)
A real coincidence is that I was listening to Eleanor Rigby as I read this thread, including these posts. And it’s probably close to a year since I last listened to that CD. [emote]:)[/emote]
That’s bananas! [emote]:P[/emote]
I have another question: What if someone gets their eight songs, and they absolutely hate all of them? Do they get a draw from the second pool, or will they just have to suck it up?
Not the comp organizer, but my personal inclination is: deal. It doesn’t matter if you like them - just if you can use one of them for inspiration. Read the lyrics if you don’t like the songs, or watch the music video on mute, or… something.
Ditto. Rise to the challenge! I’ve heard rumor of a death-metal playlist out there. . . [emote]:lol:[/emote]
What Carolyn said. Art finds a way.
My personal plan for this scenario is to do no research whatsoever, speculate wildly about the band members - making up names in the highly likely event that I don’t know them - and then write a game about their artistic process.
A quick note about scheduling, to keep me honest:
I’m planning on a coding-start date of April 10. (I was thinking about April 1, but that would mean that the first week would overlap with the final week of coding for Spring Thing, and that would suck for all concerned.) I’ll start taking song submissions starting a couple of weeks before then.
So since the date is coming up, how will our song lists be submitted?