I think this is a good concept and would like to see it happen. I would be more than willing to serve as a judge if for some reason you wanted some lunatic like me. I guess the judges would have to be people who didn't win a roulette that year, so if I don't win anything (likely) you might need me? I don't know, but I'd be willing to do it. A few points of inquiry/contention with the framework you've set out there:
- The judges could also potentially be anonymous, sending their results to me to post. The contestants would not know who the judges were until the end of the roulette.
I don't think there should be anonymous judges. While having anonymous judges sounds like an interesting idea, it eliminates the banter between judge and participant which is, in my opinion, a lot of the fun of the roulette contestants. And if there are enough judges with a totally diverse set of tastes, knowing who the judges are wouldn't help that much, because even if you send something the one judge loves, the other ones may hate it.
- Contestants would not be allowed to send any of the songs they sent in roulettes that year. This could also possibly extend to artists.
Not being allowed to send any songs that you've already sent is an interesting enough wrinkle. I think that's fair enough and it keeps there from being a roulette chalk full of Where Is Now and Meteorites and so on.
But I do not think you should prohibit contestants from sending artists that they've already sent. I think that's too crippling. Consider that most of the people are going to have won roulettes in 2015 (and thus be participants in the championship) are playing in a whole lot of roulettes—it's just sheer numbers. If somebody has played in maybe 10 or 12 roulettes in 2015, they might have made as many as 100 entries. Now, a lot of those could well be repeats, but considering that they're probably tailoring their submissions for the host, that's still a lot of artists that you're taking away from people. I think banning individual songs is fair as a fun little twist, banning artists is not because you'll wipe out people's library.
And personally, if by some miracle I win a roulette and end up as a participant in this, I'm pretty sure I would literally not be able to play if I was banned from using artists that I had used in previous roulettes. My library is simply too small and too DTF-inspired for me to play with such a rule in place. I'd have a hard enough time poking holes in a banned list anyway.
- The banned artist list for the Championship would be collated from the personal banned lists of the judges. Any artist that appears on the banned list of at least half of the judges would be banned.
This is more of a question. I completely agree with this way of making a banned list, but what is a judge to do if a song comes in that they know pretty well and the other judges don't? Would a judge who already knows a song be asked to recuse him/herself from the scoring, or just give the score that (s)he would ordinarily give that song? And what ramifications do we think that either of these options would have on the fairness of the scoring?
All these concerns said, I think this is a great idea and I strongly believe that you should do it. I just wanted to voice my opinion and questions on those. Hopefully you iron out the kinks and get this thing off the ground come January. And again, assuming I don't win anything, I would be more than happy to be a judge if you want me.