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Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

My original plan for the AM World Cup was to use albums, but I was talked out of it becuase not only do albums take a long time to listen to, they get repetative near the end of the game.
I would go with songs (or maybe artists and pick different songs).

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

I will gladly participate if this is about songs, but for albums it is just too much to spotify with so little time that I can see myself losing interest after a couple of weeks.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

Seems like most people would prefer songs, so here's what I think should be possible in that case.

We nominate 16 songs per region, meaning we'll eventually end up with 256 songs. The first nomination round will run for one week during which everyone will be allowed to pick 1 song for every region (or as many regions you know a song for), after which we'll have another round of one week, which will most likely fill up all the nominations. I think we have enough people here to make it work in two weeks, but in case we don't we'll have a third round.

The regions are still up for debate but I'd like to stick to four regions per 'continent'. I've listed some of the changes and problems still to be resolved below:

Africa:
There was quite a bit of discussion in the World Tour topic about which country should belong where. Can I leave it up to you, nicolas, to set up a list of the countries belonging to what region? This is the map Alex came up with. Do we include Turkey with 'Middle-East'?

America:
Northern Latin (Everything above Peru)
Southern Latin (Peru and below)
Using Peru as a dividing line seems quite rigorous but I don't have enough knowledge of the music there to make a more informed decision. Anyone?)

Asia:
Australia/New Zealand/Pacific Islands/Polynesia

Europe:
Northern European (Scandinavia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Iceland, Greenland?)
Eastern European (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, Slovenia, etc.)
Western European (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland)
Southern European (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece)
Ideally I'd add a 'Central European' here, but that would give only Europe 5 regions. I've excluded the UK on purpose.

When we've nominated our 256 songs we'll take one week for each 8 match ups (16 songs), so 16 weeks total, followed by regional semi-finals and finals, and global semi-finals and finals. Ultimately this'll take exactly 20 weeks.

I think it would be best to match songs from the same region against each other initially, but if the majority feel we should use random match ups that's fine by me too.

Now, for songs it becomes a little harder to exclude things, but I think the easiest way is to exclude songs on albums that have more than 1000 votes and songs from artists in the top 500 on AM. Also, no English language (with the exception of Pidgin English).

Thoughts?

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

a few comments

1) ok for Africa. Alex map wasn't bad, but as I said before, Nigerian really belongs to the West African block (geographically and musically). I'll post the list a little later

2) You didn't give us the 4 Asian regions

3) You chose to exclude the British Islands but kept Australia and NZ. Do you mean that we will only pick native music in Oceania with the no English rule ? And what about Irish music in gaelic ? Maybe it should go with Western E.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

a few comments

1) ok for Africa. Alex map wasn't bad, but as I said before, Nigerian really belongs to the West African block (geographically and musically). I'll post the list a little later

2) You didn't give us the 4 Asian regions

3) You chose to exclude the British Islands but kept Australia and NZ. Do you mean that we will only pick native music in Oceania with the no English rule ? And what about Irish music in gaelic ? Maybe it should go with Western E.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

nicolas
1) ok for Africa. Alex map wasn't bad, but as I said before, Nigerian really belongs to the West African block (geographically and musically). I'll post the list a little later
Ok, thanks. Do keep in mind that we need the four groups a little equal in artist power, that might be more important than separating them by music style. That's just my thought though.

nicolas
2) You didn't give us the 4 Asian regions
I didn't change the other 3, I just listed changes.

nicolas
3) You chose to exclude the British Islands but kept Australia and NZ. Do you mean that we will only pick native music in Oceania with the no English rule ? And what about Irish music in gaelic ? Maybe it should go with Western E.
Good points. I didn't want to exclude Australia completely, but we do have to come up with some rule to exclude the booming indie scene in Australia; "no English" may do that, but it would also exclude an artist like Fela Kuti. At least some of his songs. And yeah, I think Gaelic can go with Western Europe.

Edit: I just edited my post above to include Ireland and a rule about English exempting Pidgin English. Also, if some very unknown artist from a completely unknown music scene sings in English we could allow it. We'll perform a bit of case law in these instances.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

Another thing : where does "Middle East" end ? What about Iran ? Afghanistan and Central Asia ? They're not "big" countries musically but they're culturally just between the Arabic and the Indian world. I could add them to the ME because there are some common traits in Muslim music even between countries as far from each others as Uzbekistan and Mauritania.
let me study that a little bit and I'll come up with proposals.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

I would agree with adding them to ME, although Afghanistan can be a little tricky because their folk music is more Persian (Middle-Eastern) while their classical music belongs to South Asia.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

After looking at a map, why not

North Africa/Middle East (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Israel/Palestine, Lebannon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, UAE, Barhain, Iran)

I would put the -stan States with India and the rest in a South-Central Asian region, or else "Africa" will hold half of Asia !!

Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaidjan should be added to a big "Eastern Europe" that would actually hold almost all the European ex-communist countries

But that's your call Stephan

The rest of Africa
West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso [My second country of adoption]) and Nigeria)

Central/East Africa (Chad, Republic of Centrafrica, South Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Tanzania, Seychelles, Uganda, RDC, Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Burundi)

Southern Africa (Angola, Bostwana, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland).

That could seem unbalanced because most of the music known by the Westerners is in the West African region (Mali/Sahel, Senegal, Nigeria), but there are extraordinary things to discover in the other 2. Ethiopian and Congolese music are at least as interesting as the music from the Sahel.
If it is too unbalanced, move Nigeria to region 2.
Southern Africa is mostly South Africa but there are great things in the neighboring countries and islands.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

A game that doesn't only improve your knowledge of global music, but your knowledge of geography as well. Loving it already!

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

I really like this idea a lot.

Could we possibly try an albums one? 32 albums, just 4 albums to listen to a week? It would be utterly fascinating.

Also, pidgin English sounds hilarious!

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

Zorg
I really like this idea a lot.

Could we possibly try an albums one? 32 albums, just 4 albums to listen to a week? It would be utterly fascinating.

Also, pidgin English sounds hilarious!


Four albums per week is already prohibitive for me, and I imagine I'm not alone. I think a songs version of this game first might be a wise move.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

32 albums would be 2 albums a week, and I'm open to doing that in addition to the songs poll, but I will definitely focus on songs. Maybe we can make it a small extra for the people with too much enough time. We'd have to find a way to decide which 2 albums to nominate from each region though.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

This game sounds like entertaining and very enriching! Count me in.

Living in Germany doesn't make it easier to listen to all the music. With no access to spotify and some youtube movies being banned, it sometimes feels like living in China or Iran ...

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

Stephan, have you decided when to start the game ?

As you mentionned in the future games thread, I think now could be a good moment. There are no major polls planned outside of the decade poll.

Will you start with Africa ? I have started a recommendation thread with songs from North Africa and the Middle east

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

I was thinking we could do the nomination rounds on a global scale. Everyone gets to recommend 1 song from every region they know a song from. Some regions will most likely only have a few recommendations after the first week, but then the experts on that region can fill up the rest.

If we do a section every week it'll effectively double the amount of weeks this game will last. I'm up for it, I just don't think it would necessary.

Or would you prefer to run preliminaries (i.e. have people vote for a top 10 songs, the top 16 of which will go to the next round)? I'm not sure this would work due to the nature of the game.

Re: AM Foreign World Cup: A further attempt at highlighting the unknown

The global nomination systrem is OK