Gert - Artist of the Day, Tuneflow.com

Woke up this morning to find that Gert, a little 6-way collaboration I’m involved with,  is the featured Artist of the Day over at Tuneflow.  We entered (and won) a songwriting competition over there in November last year, Life Goes On.

Gert formed when all the members met at songfight!  Tuneflow is a similar competition, only it uses a month long cycle, instead of weekly.   (For a great article about Gert’s internet-based writing and recording process, visit Hometracked.com) It’s cool and everything, but I have beefs with the review system which allocated points to reviewers if the reviewEE thought the review warranted it.  I believe the points could then be cashed in on prizes and merch and stuff.   Coupled with some suspicious voting activity and loop-holes, it appeared that Tuneflow needed some development before it could really be serious.  I don’t mind prizes and dangling carrots, but that changes who will frequent the site, from people looking to improve and share ideas, to people who probably still want those things, but who are primarily interested in getting stuff.  It kind of smells off to me.   Another issue for me is the re-encoding/transmission of submitted tracks to an awfully low bitrate, making any differences in production, and just basic intelligibility and clarity non-existent.  And that was the deal breaker for me.  I have a hard time listening to a piece of music I’ve invested hours into, reduced to 96kbps or whatever bitrate they were using. 

Gert is currently hustling to try and get a song done in time for a songfight! title, TW3RP.    A pretty Gert-y title, if ever there was one….