Iz様 🌟

I've wanted to start this topic for a little while and I do think that now, when there's no active contest about and hopefully no feelings to be hurt, is probably the best time. Obviously we had the discussion about copperplate 2 contests ago, and several people will be aware (as I found out during the listenthrough and made everyone who attends those aware), that Lunes from last contest was also a completely AI-generated artist. AI is absolutely a huge threat to contests like these, we're all trying to find good new artists and songs that aren't known by a majority of people, even those likely to go out searching for such music. Obviously there are still real musicians putting out new stuff, but there is also a deluge of completely AI-generated songs created by people who put in no more effort than a description into Suno, and I hate it, particularly as it hits so many of my formerly loved niches really badly. Really, so many of my potential searches have come up against AI lately that now if I find one of the unknown/anonymous artists I used to love sending I am having to convince myself that they are a real person. That's partly why I wanted to start this topic, I'm finding this a real problem. I'll give you some examples, all songs I've found when doing normal searching for songs in the last few months, ranging from tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. Unfortunately for all of these I cannot prove they are fully made using AI, but while vetting them I came across some online discussions talking about the possibility and saw enough red flags to say that they are AI generated at least in part, which is enough to taint it for me: > A Japanese rock song with Latin chants, would be awesome if it was a real thing, but the ""creator"" said in the Youtube comments that they used AI to assist them. > A whole channel supposedly about promoting unknown singers with good production, but just too perfect songs, I found a reddit thread with a poster claiming to be a representative of the channel, claiming their method was to take amateur singers and 'enhance' their voices, as well as alleged social media accounts of the singers. > A channel clearly maintained by a real individual and internet streamer, putting out songs claiming to be their own, but with AI-generated art, I later found a blog post from the creator talking about the use of AI in their work, claiming that it was just a productivity tool to be used alongside other recording and drawing tools and that real effort had gone into their art > An artist that was entered to BJSC over 3 years ago, so pre-AI, but has now put out an AI-generated album and cover art, re-using their original sound to create soulless copies - and this one I only noticed because I wondered who the credited singer was and the artist was being evasive about naming them when they had no problems naming featured artists before. I was really close to entering a song from this one before I noticed btw, because their activity as an artist pre-AI made them less suspect, or so I thought. Doubtless many of you have come across similar. I haven't named any of those above as I don't think there's much to be gained by discussing whether a few specific songs are AI or not, nor do I wish to promote these people, but I can do it if anyone's really curious. It's more to give you a sense of the types of AI-generated songs you may come across, and the nuances that come with them; perhaps some participants wouldn't have a problem with some of the more borderline cases. But if anyone has any other interesting types to share, please do because I want to keep my senses attuned to spot these. I think the mods are planning to come up with a judgement on AI before it really gets ahead of the contest, but have other people been finding this many AI songs littering up normal discovery routes? How do you feel about them in the contest, in any form? in case it wasn't clear, in lieu of any judgement, I am vetting my potential entries closely to ensure I don't send AI, and am disqualifying all such entries from my points.

doing comparatively safe predictions that aren't exactly a given either to see if I can actually score a majority (or all!) here: We will have: A contest where the winner is within 40 points of #10 (like 180) A contest where the winner is over 120 points ahead of #2 (like 176) A foreign language winner A song makes the final and scores under 70 points (and isn't an autoqualifier) At least one winner one would straightforwardly assign to each large bloc (pop, alt and dance) A non-qualifier that receives 3 12s A debut winner A winner who hasn't won for 50 or more contests A song that gets at least 8 18s but does not win. A deduction costs someone a place in the top 10

New year, give your guesses at where events both domestic and international will go in the new year. Domestically, we have the Labour mid-point, perhaps the point where we start feeling good sentiment from them being in power (?) Or another year of the right-wing press gaslighting us that everything is awful and you should stop caring. Anyway, there are a set of local elections, largely focused on cities, in May, and a King's Speech due. Internationally, the domination of Ukraine and Gaza may be over as both move their way towards peace, though we know that can take a long time and people still are dying daily in this and many other conflicts around the world. On elections, there are the US midterms, but like with 2025, the scheduled elections don't have all that many that we're expecting to be significant with most of the G7 without nationwide elections this year. Israel, Brazil, Sweden, Hungary, Denmark and Bangladesh perhaps look the most likely to attract international comment.

looking back at my predictions: on Starmer/Labour: not really on the money, I underestimated the negative machine against them from both the media machine and Russian paid actors, but I was right that there's no signs of him going; and I still think that the media talk of him up until 2026 locals at most is still a little bit trying to manifest Labour chaos by talking about it. But they also made several needlessly unpopular missteps throughout the year. That said, the government has a lot of more background positives going on that no one acknowledges. Economy shows signs of improving, true. Mostly accurate about the rest of the parties, but slightly underestimated right-wing support, underestimated the utter disaster that Your Party ended up being, and completely off on those poll numbers. Good call on Germany, far too pessimistic for Canada/Australia, as both of the centre-left incumbents there held on. Slightly early for peace although signs are saying that what I predict here may be the reality somewhat soon. Nothing much happened on Syria, correct on Israel. Well, the gaffes are so numerous we forget them week after week, and it's a little hard to say where Trump approvals really are right now. It's been far from uneventful though, correct on the fallout re: Trump/Musk. Definitely some vibe that the conservative exuberance in the wake of a Trump victory was short-lived, but hard to say if that vibe is reality. summation: I was quite off here. Must do better this year.

I wondered why this was, looked up some of my votes and it seems that pretty much every contest they were somewhere in my 13-7 range with a good alt or dance song, remarkable consistency in providing the things I like for either bloc, so thank you Dan! Ironically one of the few songs I didn't vote for from them this year was their winner oops I've not been able to follow this as closely as I've liked but loving the effort in getting everyone represented and yasss at Pest being the main Séyetana track played at one of the earlier nights.

'Stronger' is such a banger, capping off an incredible album in Graduation. Much lower than I'd have put it, I think the Daft Punk sample really works to its advantage. do not recall the McFly tracks at all and I don't think they're that good (?), What A Wonderful World is a little dull but fine. Good lot to get rid of for the most part up until the top 10.

Very uncomfortable way you are describing the tragedy on October 7th 2023, ‘What Lies Beneath’. And certainly no indication you care one bit about the mass murder the IDF have been carrying out against the Palestinian people many times over since that day, nor as said, the historic atrocities in the conflict. Which Bob Vylan was right to call out.

My emoji has returned!* Keeping the Iz-sama as part of my username though because figuring that out helped my ego. *currently literally only that emoji is allowed, I'll take others on request, I'm a little wary of regexes claiming to cover all emojis because I don't know enough about them (though I'm sure I can figure it out with a bit of reading) and there are a couple of characters in the Admin CP that it does really advise against allowing so I'd rather keep it under control. as celebration, I will indeed honour Meekul's final request and add the exclamation mark until such time as someone informs me that there's a really clever SQL injection scheme that relies on a ! that will henceforth turn the Christmas WAPing! into the Christmas Happening!

Hypothetically, if I were Invision, I'd just put all the input validation on the backend and let my customers use whatever characters they want in their display names because I know that's possible and even easy with parameterised queries but apparently I'm a better software engineer than them so...

too busy tearing up the board's innards (read: trying to get it to actually follow the display name settings in the Admin CP which it doesn't because I shouldn't be allowed a 2 character username and yet, I am! While also seeing if I can edit this thing /^(([\p{L}\p{M}\p{N}_\.\-,]+) ?)+$/u to give me my emoji back while simultaneously not allowing hostile cyberattacks to nuke our database because I allow 'Christmas WAPing;sp_send_db_email spamattacker@gmail.com TABLE usernames & TABLE passwords' to be a valid username)

No, I tested the rest on my username as well. The wording is 'value is not allowed' and then fml, I decided to confirm again the minimum character length that always used to plague me on the old site, and it turns out emojis are also forbidden now. So thanks for that.

I've changed it to 'Christmas Wrapping'. For whatever reason, exclamation marks, and it seems all special characters such as "%^ etc, are forbidden values in usernames. Probably an overzealous safeguard to prevent injection attacks, even though not all of them can be used like that.

I'd have also put Beautiful Girls last, terrible song with questionable lyrical content (at best!) done by a terrible person. Really poor example of the pop-reggae fusion that was popular around this time and very whiny and throwaway besides, not even giving off good feelings like most of the good examples of such do - this is the sort of thing that makes Jason Derulo look like Bob Marley. not like those 2 #2s are anything particularly amazing but I'll enjoy both of them if I hear them at least, 'Beautiful Girls' is negative enjoyment.

These morons. Can't even do excessive redactions right (and they really are excessive, whole documents are blacked out). Opening them up for yet more legal cases no doubt.

Let's go, this year is good. At least, some of the #1s. I have strong feelings about some of the ones that I, ahem, hope end up low x Looking forward to your commentaries nevertheless Scene, I definitely remember many of these songs being inescapable at the time, the lower number helping those that did make it to become severely overplayed. Along with the many of the highest-selling non-#1s. 'Crank That' though, I guess it's objectively awful and I also thought so back then but I think these days it has a bit of a strange charm to it, I'm pretty sure it was one of the few songs I managed to get on my low quality Sony Ericsson at the time, for whatever reason - just 5 or so song files that I'd managed to get on there and that was one of them. Don't ask me why it was on there even though I disliked it. That X Factor song I have literally zero memory of, I wasn't watching the show yet, only briefly did for a few years later on, and I don't feel like reminding myself of it.

Likely they made loads more off people betting Wham for a 3rd year (something I avoided after not seeing any odds for Wham I was comfortable taking), the bookies always have their edge. Only considered Kylie as an option when she was already down at 2.6 (in decimal odds) and she didn't stay there long so I didn't end up putting any money on it this year.

Epstein files due to be released today. Well, some of them. Once the administration is finished redacting anything that would implicate Dear Leader.

"Lullaby" that very unusual charity/social awareness song that sounds brilliant, very glad to see them up there for a good cause.

sad to see Pogues not in the top 5 this year but I'm very happy to see Lullaby in their place

nice fresh song this 'Ordinary' genuinely the first time I've heard it, amazing what can happen when you don't listen to radio

Local non-chart expert feels she might have a chance at two weeks; though somewhat more to do with Christmas being in a favourable position for the charting week on a Thursday, plenty of 'Alexa, play Christmas music' to come yet.

ooh go Käärijä I may be partly to blame for Doomscroller, Exile, Faded (and other good tracks like that) falling so much, I didn't vote this year, wasn't feeling it.

I will say that due to not engaging with Amazon Music, I have not heard a single one of their Christmas songs since they started doing these exclusives and generally consider them rather objectionable through their playlist practices, what will it mean to people when the Christmas #1 is something they haven't heard simply due to not using a commercial service? Which is the case for anyone who meets one of two criteria: a) is not a fan of Kylie and b) has not been engaging with any Amazon music playlist. It is going to be a lot more people than the vast majority of Christmas #1s. The last thing I want to see is the concept of exclusives being normalised across streaming platforms. This generally stops songs from becoming generally known even more than currently. The fading of the big Christmas classics is something that will naturally come with time, but you don't create new classics by limiting their reach, in fact that's the exact opposite of what you do.

mods we got him hinting at the result, get 'im. anyway go Together For Palestine

There's no real schedule for the spinoffs, I don't want to put words in the mods' mouths but I think they're open for people to put requests in should they wish to run one. Honest truth is that there is a limit to how many song contests can be entered by enough people and with a full schedule of 10 BJSC contests a year plus whatever other song contests are going on in other forums doesn't leave too much space for the spinoff forum any more sadly. There's definitely some good creative spinoffs out there, and new ones are perhaps even better than rerunning an older concept. If you can think of any. Buzzfestivalen is technically a spinoff yes but because of its history as a common filler for the mid-year month off it has always gone in the main forum.