Recently on Remix Comps, The Fusion Room Records ran a remix contest on Remix Comps looking for remixes of their track by Nucleon called 'Leave This City'. There were some great entries in there and the winners have now been chosen and announced by the peeps from The Fusion Room as below.

Hi everyone and thanks for your patience. We had a tough time deciding! Anyway here it is...

First place goes to the FABRICE POTEC MIX
Second place goes to the HORIZONTIGO MIX
Third place goes to the DJ NODE CHILLED MIX

Thanks to everyone who entered. We hope you had fun mixing and see you next time!

This morning I saw that the Wolfgang Gartner contest that we listed last friday had been officially launched. The contest costs $3.99 to enter (about £2.41 or €2.90). We had no prize details when we listed it, so I went to update the prize details this morning after Beatport tweeted them and noticed a drastic reduction in prizes compared to previous Beatport remix contests. The prizes are pretty poor considering that you have to pay to enter and suggest to me that they are failing to pull in remixers like they once did.

I have seen that Beatport (one of the main sites still running pay for remix contests) has massive reduced prize quality over their last couple of remix contests with the current contest just giving you a remix released on Wolfgang's label and $200 Beatport giftcard, meaning they only have to sell 50 remix packs to be evens. Their recent Laurent Garnier contest got a very low number of entries (168) compared to other previous Beatport contests and considering the huge support it got from multiple music blogs that the contest got I think that is pretty poor for a 'Laurent Garnier' remix contest. The voting on Remix Comps also suggests that many people don't like a remix contest you have to pay for as we see lots of 1 star votes for those contests.

To me it looks like the remix contest that requires the purchase of remix stems is currently failing and even becoming a self fulfilling prophecy as the less the prize value the less entrants there will be, the less entrants the less prizes. The only thing that these contests currently have going for them is the chance of a release on a semi-large label remixing a semi-large name.

Other sites seem to not be finding it as lucrative as they once did either as they seem to have stopped running them completely as it has now been months since sites like TrackItDown, Juno and DJ Download have run a paid for remix contest. (TrackItDown is now actually sponsoring the FCSystemF which is free to enter).

Why Pay When You Can Remix For Free?
Some people may argue that Beatport are covering their cost of distribution, this doesn't add up as server costs are extremely cheap these days for simple transferring of files. Another argument is that 'you have to pay to remix big named artists with good prizes', yet I can currently think of remix contests of big named artists that are current running including System F, Wolfmother, Florence and the Machine, Matisyahu, Weezer, and Dredg. All cost nothing to get the remix stems to have a go and most have better prizes too. Sites like FiXTRemix offer free stems and yet have some amazing prizes on a monthly basis

There has been a drastic increase in the number of remix contests running too as we now have about 100 contests listed. (and 99% of them are free). Comparing this to when we first started listing remix contests (14 months ago) we were lucky to find about 40.

Does The Paid For Remix Contest Actually Backfire on the Artist?
It could be said that these remix contests are actually backfiring on the artist running them as they are usually for a more well known band or musician and it just looks like a money making scheme and even slightly unsupportive of upcoming talent by trying to make some money out of them. I also see lots of negative comments on forums about having to pay for the stems.

One thing that I think looks extremely bad is the fact that even though you have paid for the remix stems, you don't even own them as they are still not royalty free. You still leave yourself open to being sued if you were to release a track containing a sample from the stems. This is completely different to many paid for sample packs you can buy.

How Does Remix Comps Treat Pay For Remix Contests?
We treat them like any other contest, we list on the listing in red that you have to pay and when we tweet or facebook we also put a warning message about the cost. I want to keep our list of contests complete but I have contemplated not listing them at all or putting some sort of warning button on those listings which linking to some sort of page.

Yet some sites still like to 'support' these contests as if they are special and as this site and post proves they're not that special at all, I advise people to go and try a free remix contest instead and put that $4 towards some proper samples from one of the many decent royalty free sample packs available from multiple online stores or some music equipment.

It would be good to hear others thought on this in the comments below...