honestly though if it were me at the end of the day i’d care more about the quality of the tracks than the artwork, but that’s just me,… also the philosophy of keeping it simple(in terms of artwork imo) kinda works best with wide demographics…also sometimes too much is too much and can detract from it…
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@bfk, we’ve talked with Auto and Relic in the past about doing an official IDMf Beat Battle comp or release of some sort (before the great fall). The main points that we need to meet before such a thing are:
- Quality
We need to get tracks that are of satisfactory quality for the netlabel’s standards. I’m not terribly concerned about this, as I feel we have some great talent in the BB crew. However, the nature of the Beat Battles, namely a loose, informal, raw and dirty kind of competition, means sometimes the tracks are put together quickly, without lots of mixing and such, which is resolved by allowing artists to polish up their tracks before sending them off to be mastered.
The problem we had tho was that on many tracks the artists no longer had the project files, and weren’t able to polish it up, even just a copy of the master wav.
I think this is easily solved with a disclaimer in the Beat Battle description (which we need to devise a boilerplate description for, but that’s another topic) for participants to hold onto their session files and samples in the event their track is selected for release, so they can go back and clean it up a bit and prepare it for an official submission.
- Track archival/availability
Old winning tracks disappeared off the internet. We wanted to do a best of reaching as far back as the first Beat Battle (of the Beat Battles v2.0, but that’s more a historical note), but many tracks were missing, winning tracks and others.
This is easily solved as you mentioned, archiving winning tracks. I certainly could add them to the BB archive as we move along, and other people who’d like to archive them as well, the more the better. Redundancy is key, especially in the digital domain.
- Finally, and probably the biggest thing, Sample Clearance
Before the forum went down, we had talked a lot about this, as this is probably the biggest obstacle. We need samples that are free to use. It’s fun and all taking a popular track and completely chopping it up into something completely different, but we need to protect the label by finding a legitimate and on-board way of finding and distributing samples.
Officially, samples provided in the Beat Battles must be free of copyright and free to use, however, there is little to no process for actually quality checking this. I think finding a way to either build a sample library from member generated samples, or licensing sample libraries for use would be good options here. Obviously, IDMf has very little budget. I wouldn’t expect them to foot the bill for a community project, so we’d have to find a way of either financing it or getting around the finance issue. Again, this must be in a legitimate manner. Doing it in one of these ways, however, would help guarantee the copyright status of the samples. Furthermore, I had an idea on sample submissions that I’ll go into in the Beat Battle Discussion thread.
Aside from this, we’d need some sort of quality checking on samples before making them available.
These are the hurdles we need to get over for a release, and I want to see it happen!
Also, @bfk, I’ve been following the Beat Battles for some time and am dedicated to pushing them forward, feel free to DM me if you want to bounce ideas about this release, as I’d definitely like to see it happen.
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other than making some new ammendments in regards to using creative commons samples (from a sample library made by idmf users/and other creative commons sites) and getting permission/consent to use such samples, and archiving winning bb tracks, to the already existing bb rules, like you suggested i think that we both covered most of it…also sent you a dm, happy holidays guys…
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If the netlabel is going to focus more on solo releases maybe the community could some how try to jump start group projects and offer them up to Auto / RFJ, and crew. Much like an individual artist would demo their work.
Not a you join the group you’re in type of work but still based on which x number works for a particular. Hell, I’m not even sure the IDMFNetlabel guys would be up for it. Just know it has to be a crippling process to keep track of every time one happens.
I mean just like the BB is community driven, the Beat Tapes were a failed project but there were some neat things that came from it. I felt anyway.
Just throwing an additional idea out.
I don’t have a problem with what the guys are doing. The releases have been stellar so far. And art work wise, I would assume if you’re throwing a demo out, said artist could include their own artwork too.
i dug through your soundcloud, you do have some old bb tracks, digging bb27, bb25, bb26, and the track from thebadspawns
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Oh, I have a whole bunch more links saved for either winning or personal selections. Before the old it’s was obliterated, we were talking about a BB release and as they hadn’t been properly documented, I went through and grabbed links for all the winning tracks, and choice selections when the winner link was no longer available.
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I can probably share those links somewhere.
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That’s awesome IO. Nice planning ahead without knowing the forum would implode. 
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OK, cool, now it seems more possible being that we won’t have to wait a whole year to get some tracks for the best of the BB release, I guess you can either create a thread in the community projects subforum, for the links to the tracks or pm the links to the idmf staff, also I’m curious to hear what you have archived…
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Are the links download able or are they just links, if they’re just links then I guess it’s time to get in touch with those who made the track/ find out who is still active, and who doesn’t mind having their track being considered for release
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Posted a link in the Beat Battle Discussion thread: Beat Battle Discussion
You’ll have to go through them to see if they’re downloadable. Some of them were direct links, but most were on Soundcloud.
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Hey all, I’m closing this as I think the recent State of the Union addressed the OP of this thread. If you really think it needs opened for some reason PM me.