Slam Dunk main man, Ben Ray has released a statement regarding the recent controversy surround their battle of the bands competition.
You can read his statement below.
So it seems I made a great error of judgement trusting Facebook to help us run the competition to find local bands to play at this year’s Slam Dunk Festivals. Like most people I had no idea that votes could be bought or that anyone would stoop so low as to cheat in what was meant to be a fun competition!
Over the years I have seen many ‘battle of the band’ competitions and with each one there comes various criticisms of the voting system and claims of unfairness. So we set out to create a simple but fair system. The first email nominations part was to find bands that had built up a good local following and fan base…. This part went well! Next, the bands were assigned to regions, and judges picked 5 bands from the top 10 per region to go to the public vote.
For the next stage we wanted the people that are actually going to the events to genuinely check out all the bands, even if they hadn’t heard of them, and then vote for the bands they actually want to watch at the event. It seemed a very logical idea to put each one to a Facebook vote. We had successfully used this previously with the T-shirt competition and, more importantly, as the voting is done clearly in the open, we thought there could be no accusations of any fixing or cheating! Oh how wrong we were!
So, like me, if you weren’t aware – there are a number of websites and Facebook pages where you can simply just pay for votes in any Facebook competition. It seems a number of bands have received votes from these services.
Like many of you have noticed and pointed out, the votes appear on our page from either fake accounts or what seem to be real people who vote in a lot of Facebook competitions. We have also used analytic software to see which bands have had votes that originated from one of these services.
However neither us or any of you can accuse any of these bands of cheating themselves. Even if they have received votes from a questionable source, how do we know it was the bands themselves…. It could have been from some crazy fan, a proud parent or maybe it was one rogue member of the band and the rest of the band don’t know? I definitely think some of that is true as I have seen some bands accusing other bands of cheating, when they themselves have questionable votes.
So what we are going to do is simply ignore this part of the competition. We will shortly be announcing the winners and we will simply be using the first 2 parts of the system, a combination of the email voting and judges scores.
I’m sorry it has taken this long to act but we had to take the time to thoroughly investigate. We couldn’t have made a statement until it had been decided what to do. It has been hard to watch people accuse of us of not knowing what’s going on, when really we have been watching closely and quietly! Although, admittedly it has been quite funny to think that some cheating idiot has been spending loads of money buying votes which won’t count, jokes on you!
We would like also to apologise to the bands that have taken to this competition honestly and fairly, and dedicated a lot of time and effort drumming up votes for themselves. We understand it is not fair on you guys to be subjected to all of this, however, we see no other way but to eliminate this stage of the competition completely and revert back to the previous two stages.
None of these bands go away empty handed though. Every band that has got through to this stage has done well. No matter how many votes were fake, it is clear to see they all already have big and loyal fan bases, and the judges thought they may have what it takes to make it. More importantly, hopefully no matter how controversial this has been, more people have now heard of them, checked them out, and they have all probably gained new fans. And if they are as good as you say they all are, I’m sure we might see some of them play Slam Dunk Festival in the future!
If you haven’t done so yet, please listen to all the bands…. You might actually find you some bands you really like who you hadn’t heard of before! Most of all though, please continue to support live music, especially local bands!
Many thanks, Ben Ray