Alright, we are one week into our open nominations for the People’s Choice Music Tournament, and I’m happy to report that a total of 78 songs have already been entered (or enough to fill over 4 of our 16 divisions.) Not bad at all and we still have two weeks to go…get those nominations in! Getting into the numbers:

• 4 of 16 Gold Tier Voters have submitted their nominations (including Janos and I)
• 3 of 16 Silver Tier Voters have submitted (if anyone knows how to contact Virgil, please tell him- we got a bounce-back on the e-mail we sent him)
• 5 of 13 Bronze Tier Voters have submitted (African Dave dropped out because he’s on assignment in a place without Internet. We look forward to your votes when you come back from the field.)
• 15 additional voters submitted nominations, including a whopping 11 brand new voters. (Much kudos to Danno for his massive marketing effort/spamming his Google contact list about the tourney.)

Looking over the list, I am excited already- this looks nothing like the line-up for the LTDMT tourney, and I’m already YouTubing new tunes getting pumped. Specifically, The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” and The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues” are two promising songs I’ve never heard before that I’m definitely bumping my head to. The picture above is Alex Chilton with The Replacements.

(…and I’ve watched “Jack Sparrow” maybe 25 times since 10 AM. Lonely Island featuring Michael Bolton has Round 1 Giant Killer written all over it, I wouldn’t want to be the one whose top seed has to face that early.)

Other Details

We’ve gotten some questions on what happens if we run out of spots for new nominations. While we do want a 256 song tourney, we’d be remiss to turn away a new voter who wants their song to get a shot. Therefore, if we go over the limit on our new nominations, we will do a couple days of play-in rounds in late May to win a 16 seed.

At this moment, there are still 23 unclaimed nomination spots left.

IMPORTANT: If you are a Gold, Silver, or Bronze tier voter and we don’t get your nominations by 5:00 PM EST on May 25th, you will lose your spots and they will go to new voters. Don’t let that happen.

E-mail your nominations to LTDdotorg@gmail.com. 2 weeks left to pick those songs!