What About Demotions?

Ryan Dunn | July 17, 2009
So I just voted to promote Wilco and had a thought. Why not offer demotions? I just saw Blind Melon has an R3 value??? No way a one hit wonder deserves R3 status IMO. Is this an option that I'm not aware of?

Steve Dunn | July 17, 2009
I would love to vote for some demotions. I'm not offended by Blind Melon, though. The album their "one hit" came from is excellent.

I think demotion votes would be useful for overall calibration purposes.

Aaron Shurtleff | July 17, 2009
I would be concerned that this could lead to hard feelings, personally. I think the system of only vote to promote if you really like the band (and think it deserves promotion) helps keep the bands we all love moving up. Voting down bands could lead to angry posts of "How could you vote down [whatever band]?! Are you stupid?", which would be replied to by "Well [whatever band] is highly respected by critics, which you would know if you had any kind of ACTUAL musical knowledge!", which of course leads to "WHAT?! Just because some pinhead with a column in a magazine says [whatever band] is good, you'll just agree?! SHEEP!!" It would go downhill from there, and I'd wouldn't like to see so much hate all up in here.

You could switch out that argument above with:
[whatever band] makes a lot more/less money
[whatever band] is still touring after [however many years]
[whatever band] is played more on the radio
etc.

Personally, I have bands that I like to see rise, and if they don't rise, it doesn't bother me much. If I saw a band I loved moving down when I think they should rise, I would be bothered. Maybe that means I'm less of a rational person than the rest of the site, and I will accept that, but I think demotions would cause more problems than it would solve. My personal opinion.

Not to make it personal, but I hear No Rain all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard a single Wilco song ever. And I channel surf on the radio constantly, not just on certain stations that play the types of music I like. Don't get me wrong, I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing No Rain ever again, and be quite satisfied. It would be difficult for me to promote Wilco, so I wouldn't promote it, but how would you feel if I voted them down because I don't know them, but I do know Blind Melon?

Steve Dunn | July 17, 2009
Scott, could you implement a function where I can vote for a goo user's demotion in userrank? Not that I have anyone in particular in mind.

Ryan Dunn | July 17, 2009
Dude.

"Well [Wilco] is highly respected by critics, which you would know if you had any kind of ACTUAL musical knowledge!"

"[Wilco] makes a lot more/less money
[Wilco] is still touring after [15 years]"

Seriously though. I just think it would be fun to add demotions. I don't think people would take it too personally. More likely it would spark friendly debate--Huey Lewis and the News is an R4?!?!?!--

Steve Dunn | July 17, 2009
Do you think Huey is ranked too high or too low?

Ryan Dunn | July 17, 2009
Actually, I think R4 is about right for Huey.

Ted Nugent at R6 is a little much for me to handle, though. I'd definitely vote to knock him down a peg if I could.

Aaron Shurtleff | July 17, 2009
And the argument could be made that Blind Melon was stunted by the death of Shannon Hoon, and that, for their small number of albums, they had a great deal of success. There's a lot of decisions that go into whether or not a band should be promoted. I think the number of decisions that go into demoting a band would be much fewer. I'll leave Wilco alone (lest I feel the full displeasure of the brothers Dunn!), but I honestly only used it because it was the start of the discussion.

Seriously, ask someone why they like one band, and ask why they dislike another, and I think the average person would be able to articulate why they like a band better than why they dislike another. Demotion, I think, would be more arbitrary for that reason. It's easier to let bands that multiple people like move up, than to ask people to try to figure out why a band they've never heard (or possibly never heard of) should or should not be demoted. Assuming that it works like promotions and you can only have one band per rank that you admit for demotions (if I have it right, I think I tried to submit two bands to move up at one rank, and was only allowed to do one. Scott would know better than I), how do you fairly pick the one band out of all of them at one rank which should be demoted? How can you accurately decide which is "the worst"? Which is more worthy of demotion: a band you've heard and just didn't like, or a band you've never heard? I would say that at least with the band you dislike, you've heard their music, which makes them slightly better than a band that you've never even heard, but how can you demote a band you've never even heard??

Can anyone here honestly say that they have heard every band at R3 (for example), and can say which is the worst band, and so vote to demote it? (Yeah, R10 and some other high ranks are easier, of course, but still...) I think it would be way to complex. I have a hard enough time finding one that stands out above the rest to promote, trying to find one to demote would kill me.

Amy Austin | July 17, 2009
I was just about to add comments about not holding *death* against a band... but I see A-ron beat me to it. And I think he presents very sound logic against the idea of demotions. Bonus points for doing so in the face of "the brothers Dunn". ;-)

Aaron, you can pick more than one promotion per rank -- I believe that these numbers must be set at some sort of percentage by rank, though, since you can pick far more at the R1 level than you can at, say, the R9 level. Which makes sense, since there are bunches of R1 bands... not so many R9s.

Ryan Dunn | July 17, 2009
When it comes to selling albums and gaining status, I think death is more often an advantage for bands and artists.

There's a long list of dead-too-soon music legends from drugs and guns. To me, the fact that Hoon didn't escalate to a higher level of rock prominence after his death(from a drug overdose, no less...the rock star ticket to Legendville) works against him.

Nobody's biting on Ted Nugent. Seriously, can someone defend Nugent's R6 status...with a straight face?

Amy Austin | July 17, 2009
I was going to try... just to be contrary... but you got me -- couldn't keep a straight face.

Scott Hardie | July 17, 2009
I can make an objective case for Ted Nugent being R6: A majority of players voted for him to be promoted from R5. I'm not a fan of his, but I can go along with that.

I think the criteria for voting for a promotion is getting distorted. Bands that you like is not supposed to have anything to do with it. It's supposed to be bands that are great. I'm not a fan of Ray Charles, but without a doubt he strikes me as the only R9 right now who deserves to become R10, because of his legendary stature. (Just last night, I watched a documentary about soul music, and one performer said that touching Charles's shoulder on a stairwell once, just for a fleeting moment, was like touching the Lord.) I figured that some players would vote just on the basis of their personal likes, and there's not much I can do about that, but it's not the point.

Demotions have been considered before, and I haven't ruled them out. The system is weighted so that there is a certain number of bands in each rank, so demoting Ted from R6 to R5 would result in a different R5 suddenly taking his place at R6. At that point, what's to stop Ted's fans from voting for him to go back up to R6 again? Doesn't it just get stuck in a loop? I can come up with some kind of way to make a promotion or demotion stick for a while, like voting is off-limits three months afterwards or something.

Lesser bands that got into the game early had a big advantage in promotions, because there wasn't much competition back then, and because the system only allowed promotions for the bands that had been waiting for it the longest, so the more deserving names were off-limits. Not only did this allow lesser names like Blind Melon and Lynn Anderson and Lonnie Donegan to reach R3, but it was about to make some of them R4s if I hadn't put a stop to that silliness and opened the promotion poll to the entire body of performers. These days, all promotions are based solely on user votes, although my preference still settles a tie in user votes. If you don't think that a recent promotion should have happened, you're in the minority.

The game was never intended to have demotions in the first place, since in principle, promotions are only supposed to happen to bands that deserve it, and so if one winds up too high because I misjudged their importance when creating the card or something, then the system would eventually correct itself by promoting better cards around this band while they stayed put. Unfortunately, because of the old promotion poll only allowing votes for the bands who had gone the longest without a promotion, that system failed to come about until around six months ago, and so we're still stuck with a lot of weirdness, like Lenny Kravitz at R4. (And I say that as a fan of his.)

I do wish more people voted in promotions. I see an occasional stray vote in the system, but it seems like only a half-dozen people really make a point of voting consistently. If you want a reminder, turn on the "Promotion Poll" subscription in Dashboard. This really helps me make good decisions about who should rise in rank.