This competitions ran between November 30 2010 and January 12th 2011.  This was followed by two weeks for voting, which closed on January 26th.  Winners will be officially announced on February 16.  To view all the results and to listen to all the remixes submitted, visit http://www.indabamusic.com/opportunities/ace-of-base-the-sign

tsThese competitions, ran by Indabamusic.com,  had a fantastic response with over 300 remixes being entered for The Sign and about 150 remixes of All For You.

The choice of using Indaba Music as the competition platform was an interesting one.  You’ll remember that previous AOB remix competitions were run by a start-up venture called Koblo, which went bust not long after the competitions (but appears to be relaunching soon).  Indaba Music, by comparison, is a much larger organisation.  It is a very well-established, large community of DJs and remixers, but perhaps the most noticeable difference between these two communities are the music styles.  Where as those who entered the Koblo competition were most likely to be Acers and pop/dance friendly, the Indaba Music  community appears to be a community of dubstep/eclectic/experimental music enthusiasts. The result?  Many more remixes, but also a much wider range of music styles submitted.  Whether this is a good thing or not, I will leave up to you.

afyThe quantity of entries, while great for Acers, did cause another problem.  It made voting extremely difficult.  After all, who is going to sit down and listen to 300 remixes?  That would take over 20 hours (conservative estimation).  Although I did, I very much doubt many others would have gone through and listened to every single remix.  Thus it became more of a popularity contest; who could get the word out by spamming their remix address all over Facebook, Twitter, etc. and getting their friends to vote them up.  I would have liked to see someone in an official capacity – preferably Jonas and Ulf – judge the competition.  If the top 20 remixes were presented to them after voting, at least we could be sure that the winners had great sounding remixes.

If you don’t have time to go through all 300 remixes, I’ve saved and uploaded the ones I like.  That’s about a 100 (or a third) of the Sign remixes, and about 40  (just under a third) of the All For You remixes.  You can find them here.  The disturbing thing is, not many of my favourite remixes were in the top 10. It was seeing so many of these good remixes ranking so low that made me start to wonder about this whole process.

Which are your favourite remixes?  What did you think of the competition?  Leave a comment below.