Music League: The Definitive Review
It’s just a bit of fun, lads
I officially retired from online multiplayer about twenty two years ago. Having spent the best part of two years with infinite free time and easy access to both early broadband and the necessary relaxants to enjoy it, an obsession with an Unreal Tournament-based Counter Strike clone landed me with RSI in both wrists. The rest of the decade saw some meagre jabs here and there at MMO and multiplayer FPSing, but I was essentially done. That was until the arrival of Music League in the small gaming community I’ve been a member of since my wrist-based retirement back in 2003. Imagine my surprise when it turned out this simple web-based submit-and-vote popularity contest turned out to be just as bitterly fought at the average Counter Strike round, only with far worse trash talk and abuse on our Discord channels. Having been through a few leagues, our community’s rule is that if you win, you run the next season. We run a private game full of the kind of in-jokes and thinly-masqueraded abuse you’d expect from a ghoulish cabal of middle-aged men who’ve been videogaming all their lives, but have wildly idiosyncratic music tastes and it’s brilliant fun. I was lucky enough to steal a victory earlier this year and hence, was finally in charge of running a season. As great as that sounds, the one singular lesson I’d take from the whole experience is this: never underestimate how seriously people will take competitive play.
Music League is a web-based voting competition wherein the season runner sets submission briefs for however many rounds they want the season to run for. Players then submit songs via their linked Spotify account and can add in a comment about the submission. A playlist is generated for Spotify for listening, or you can preview a snippet of the submissions inside the Music League voting interface. However, the identity of the submitters is hidden until after voting has been completed. While assigning votes you can leave an optional comment on each entry and once that’s done, it’s on to the next round. All of this is configurable, from the number of rounds to the timings for submission and voting, the number of songs per brief and the amount of votes and/or downvotes to be awarded per round. As I will describe later, I took an extreme and experimental approach to running Music League, which left me with the firm conviction that I should never, ever attempt to DM a tabletop RPG. In general, our seasons would consist of ten rounds, which in most cases were all revealed at the start of the season. Some players loved this, as it meant they could plan out their choices in advance and have themselves set for the ten weeks, only having to remember to make their submissions at the relevant times. I opted to take the complete opposite route, which meant only revealing the next round’s brief once voting had started for the current round in play. This was a lot more hands-on in GM terms, but meant I could be much more dynamic with my planning, not to mention being able to control an element of surprise, for I had a couple of rounds that weren’t so much experimental as they were savagely iconoclastic. Having to announce those briefs weeks ahead of submission would have ruined the drama, so to speak. And if there’s one thing to know about Music League with middle-aged men, it’s that drama will always happen. Hence, I opted to engender as much drama as possible with the way I wanted to run the season’s structure, and dynamic briefing was just part of that. Dynamic briefing meant I could also tweak briefs to suit the mood of the players and/or work on ideas that came to mind once the league was in play. I’d recommend all Music League admins follow this lead - it’s much less stress knowing you need two or three briefs to start the season than it is coming up with ten of them, and the ability to swap the sequencing, amend texts (etc etc) gives so much more freedom. I’m certain that in talented hands, this is the true path to full Music League enlightenment.1
There is a class of Music League briefs that allow any genre to be submitted, and therefore allow the wildly clashing tastes of the combatants to interact with unusual ferocity. Sometimes you can get great results and good playlists by specifying genres in the brief, but it’s not guaranteed. I’d seen seasons where the goal was to generate ‘good’ playlists for actual listening, but I thought that was a fool’s errand given the distinct rifts in music tastes amongst the playing victims. I opted for other criteria for all but one round, sometimes playing more with the idea of soundtracking made-up events for people we all knew, such as one of our Discord going for a walk to the shops. That member’s music preferences are easily found, so it did suggest particular genres, but that wasn’t demanded by the brief. Instead, the idea was to pick a tune that was the ideal musical accompaniment. I felt that by demanding the use of imagination rather than musical knowledge or simple genre ransacking, we’d get playlists that were more varied and fun. This had mixed results 🙁. But I certainly got plenty of drama, as planned. My genre-specific round was Classical, but I perverted it by specifying popular Classical, with the goal being a playlist of pieces that everyone would know. A previous Jazz round suffered somewhat by being an exercise in extreme personal tastes, so I figured we should go for broke. I also hoped several players would pile onto the same classical tunes, creating immense drama, but amazingly this didn’t happen. Turns out there are a fucking shitload of very popular classical pieces. And what’s worse, five of my faves didn’t even get submitted and I fucked myself over by taking a comedy route.
The real metagame of Music League is in the commenting and the forum side-discussion. This is where the real entertainment lies, in the trading of jibes and abuse, love and praise, between a friend group that’s know each other for decades but never really explored each other’s tastes in music. And this was an absolute blast for me. I demanded every submission included a submission statement, which was a way of making sure there’d be plenty to discuss in the sidechannels and the all-important voting remarks. This was a way of making sure the submissions were properly thought-through and not simple googled kneejerks, which is what you have to suspect is happening if someone posts a tune without any comment to give context or justification for their appalling musical taste. However, a major source of drama came from the scoring, wherein I made the most spectacular fuckup in the history of our Music Leagues that resulted in some of the most delicious forum drama possible, which would have been impossible if I’d tried to engineer it.
I’d opted for a radical scoring approach. Previously, there’d been variations on simple upvoting, with five or ten available. Recently, we’d had downvoting added, but in small amounts. I opted to go extreme and allow just one upvote and one downvote for the entire playlist. The idea here was to make the players really think about which tune deserved the upvote and given the general animosity between all of us over music tastes, an equally tortuous decision over which one they hated. Initially, this seemed fun. But it developed into a maddeningly limiting scoring method that left just about everyone frustrated that they couldn’t reward submissions that they liked. It was just too binary - it generated good results in the sense that generally speaking, the most popular tune would still win, but it made the whole game less fun to play. Masquerading under the fiction that I was running an full-on experimental program, I held fast until the midpoint of the season. However, in testing a change of vote allowance that I will return to later, another player started voting and suddenly found themselves with 9 upvotes instead of 1! That’s what you get for fucking with the live deployment instead of running a dark secondary league for testing. This created amazing drama on the Discord, and given the generally unhinged nature of the briefs and my running of the game up to this point, it was unclear to my subjects if this was intentional or not. However, it did cause legitimate distress to the victim, for which I am very sorry. But I can’t apologise for the fallout as it was frankly hilarious to watch.
A classic maxim from our Music League history is “it’s just a bit of fun, lads”, which I took entirely to heart from my first season. This was actually the second season our community had run, but I missed the inaugural one. Shame, as it was full of drama from the off, going as far as seeing one member leave the league and the forum itself for a brief period of time due to personal feelings over various submissions and voting patterns. Wading in with a total disregard for other players’ behavioural quirks, I made a comedy submission for a brief about submitting WWE entry music for a community member. I submitted Rotterdam Termination Source - Poing, as the visual of said member pogoing to the ring to the sounds of this novelty proto-Gabber hit brought me too much joy, only to find out that the majority of players had listened to the tune in its entirety and as such, fucking hated it. This made two things clear to me:
1) The popularity of the tune is paramount, relevance to the brief is secondary.
2) These fucking fools have obliged themselves to listen to the whole fucking thing for each submission.
Point 1 should have been obvious to me from the start, but point 2 was actually a bit of a shock to discover. I’d never considered for a second that anyone would listen to Poing all the way through. Surely you just need to get the gist to get how it fulfils the brief, right? This was, after all, my entire philosophy for voting. I don’t need to listen to a 10-min thrash metal workout to know I’m not giving it any votes. But it seems that for the majority, Music League voting is a quasi-religious act of faith, devotion and subservience to the playlist. I was told that you must listen to the entire submission to honestly judge it. I found this both:
1) Somewhat weird and overly serious for something meant to be fun.
2) Patently absurd and open to terrible, terrible abuse.
I never did abuse this to the fullest,2 but it did form the basis of a brief for my season, and one that I truly agonised over. I shall disclose this later.
So by round five, I knew I had to change the scoring. I had planned to go off the rails a bit with the briefs in the second half, but the universal frustration with the minimalist voting meant I could go properly mental. My Music League was now about testing the boundaries of the game and the tolerance of the audience. They were very much trapped in here with me. It’s an odd thing to have that level of control, and to know that you can genuinely upset people if you get it wrong. Despite my in-forum insistence that this is supposed to be fun, people were determined to take it so seriously, it became highly personal. But then, that should be expected when you’re asking people to expose their tastes to public scrutiny, but also under the aegis of an extreme and unreliable master. I suffered a protest drop-out, which saddened me, but given that someone had already dropped out from not being able to fully commit to the schedule, it felt par for the course in some ways. I can only apologise for any suffering I caused and once again, I AM VERY SORRY, but the maxim remains: it’s just a bit of fun, lads!
My decision was to ramp scoring up to the maximum that Music League would allow, which is 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. I thought fuck it, let’s go right to the fucking edge - and what a way to finish the season. By incrementing from 10 votes for round five and adding 10 as each round passed, the scoring became both wildly unpredictable and fascinating to watch. Music League voting is always about getting in as early as possible and watching the voting unfold. Once you’ve voted, you can follow the results as they roll in. With traditional, sensible voting allotments you can see the trending winners and losers emerge quite predictably, but once you get into the 20-30 votes range, dumping all your votes into the song you love most and the song you hate hardest can completely tip the balance if other voters have gone for spreads. The fact that the voting is blind in terms of being able to see who submitted each song and what score it has makes this all the more hilarious when big upsets occur. As such, I would recommend setting high vote allotments, although downvoting can be optional. Personally, I love downvoting shit I don’t like, or submissions I feel are lazy or don’t fit (or comedically contradict) the brief. Seeing massive downvote totals on an entry is hilarious in and of itself, and then finding out who submitted it can be a real chef's kiss moment when the group dynamics are as fun as ours.
Another unwritten rule of the group that I callously ignored was the naming of songs for the brief before voting had started. It’s seriously taboo to mention any song while the submission period was open lest you tread on toes or mention a song someone wants to secretly submit, so I decided to smash this wide open by naming each round title with a tune. The cunning part of this was I got to do two playlists, with my sacred cows for each round immune to the ravages of the crowd, while also giving clear examples for the intent of each brief. I loved that aspect, so I’d heartily recommend budding Music League admins follow suit. A key example was in a brief I made to break out of Spotify’s cursed shackles and ride into the wondrous realms of YouTube: submit a song that has a video that’s as good, or better, than the song and put the YouTube link in the submission statement. I titled this Aha - Take On Me because, well, that’s the obvious winner innit.3 This was deliciously meta for me as the GM, for it let me submit my own winners before anyone else was able to snag them. And yet, I think it only worked for that single round! All my other picks weren’t remotely in contention.
Running Music League is a very different experience to participating in it. Likewise, winning Music League is like entering a unique endgame in some complex RPG, where suddenly you’re in charge of the game and curiously, are not really allowed to win it. It means that you don’t feel pressure to compete as much as you do to provide, which is a fascinating shift in motive. Having now run my winner’s season too, I feel much more excited about playing future seasons without any need to compete. I’ve reached a level of nirvanic purity, where my submissions can be purely for the brief, not for the win. I think the greatest moment of Music League theatre I pulled off was for my penultimate round, which I gauged would be the right time to exert maximum control and extract my revenge on the group.4 Given the furore I’d caused over submitting songs intended to be skipped, and my general belief that it’s totally fine to skip through songs when voting, I submitted a round with the title Star Trek TNG HD Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 12 hrs).
Star Trek TNG HD Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 12 hrs) was the title of a legendary YouTube sleeping aid, which I’d used as an example during a skipping-is-fine argument to show how absurd the ‘must listen in entirety’ argument actually could be. Literally a reductio ad absurdum, I said that I could quite easily post that as the submission and going by the steadfast rules of the majority, they’d have to listen to the whole 12 hours or be hypocrites. Luckily, Spotify is so shit that I couldn’t find the 12 hour version, so instead demanded submissions that were at least 60 minutes long. This was met with a reaction I loved, but it could only work if I’d withheld the round briefs. Amazingly, all but one of my remaining victims fulfilled the brief, though they were very silent about whether or not they’d skipped the entries. Of course they fucking did. And of course they fucking loved skipping shit.
In closing, only play Music League if your ego can handle it. And if you win and run your own season, remember that you’re in for a hard time no matter what you do. But it is a joyously simple game of social dynamics and blind popularity. I maintain that its biggest crime is being tied to Spotify. It genuinely limits what you can submit, which is especially galling considering YouTube has fucking everything, even if the niches are covered in less-than-legal fashion. But if you have enough friends willing to put their music tastes on the line, it’s a fine enough diversion for a few weeks. But don’t fuck with the timings. I went with a four-four method of four days to submit, four to vote, but this is cut short when all submissions or votes are in. This meant that deadlines were sprayed all over the place, which several victims found incredibly challenging to deal with.5 Stick to rigid timings. Of course, I was fine. And you know why? Because to me, it was just a bit of fun, lads.
[21]
And fuck the haters that want all the fucking briefs at the beginning like spoiled children wanting to know all their presents before Christmas what the fuck get a fucking grip holy shit. Pathetic. Just pathetic.
This is a lie, for in a round that asked for cover versions of the Beatles, I submitted a 16-minute instrumental medley by Booker T and the MGs, purely out of spite.
In case you didn’t realise, this single brief was the reason for making submission statements mandatory AND making each round name the title of a song.
The worry here is that by pulling off this grand joke, I’d made Music League all about me and my whims rather than the spirit of competition. But hey, we’d done loads of competing so it was time to have fun. For me, at everybody else’s expense. But y’know, fuck ‘em. You can always leave, which people did!
Heartfelt apologies to the player who couldn’t handle the timings and left, despite submitting great entries for downvoting into oblivion.