Surface Festival Regional Showcase - How it works

The Sharp Darts are through to the regional showcase of Surface Festival 2011 at O2 Academy Birmingham! In this post I want to talk a little about how this round works, as it's a little different to the previous rounds.

In the first two rounds of the competition, the scoring was reasonably complicated, being based on text votes (1 rating), audience votes (5 ratings), musician votes (20 ratings) and industry votes (30 ratings). In the semi-final this changed slightly with the introduction of a judge.

In the semi-final, text and audience votes were added together and the top four bands were presented to a judge who voted through two acts of their choosing, independent of how may ratings they got. In the regional showcase, judges will play an even bigger role in selecting which bands continue to the International Final at IndigO2 in London.

With musician and industry votes being dropped in the semi-final, the audience vote is also not applicable for the regional showcase. The all day event featuring 20 competing bands and a headline act will be decided by text votes and judging alone.

There will be three judges who will put all 20 bands in their order of preference, with the top band getting 20 points and the lowest band getting 1. Each judges vote will count for 25% of the score, with a total number of 60 points available (if all judges think the same band is the best).

The remaining 25% of the score is made up of text votes. The 20 bands text votes will be counted up on the night and put into a rankings table in a similar manner to the judges vote, with the band with the most text votes getting 20 points and the band with the least text votes getting one point.

These points are then added together to give a total score out of 80, the top five bands will then progress to the International Showcase.

So far we have accumulated 164 text votes throughout the competition, we'd like to thank you for texting, every vote has helped us get this far! At the time of writing, 16 bands have been confirmed as through to the regional showcase and of those bands, we are currently 9th in terms of text votes, so we need you to dig deep for us and get us some more text votes. We need at least 50 more votes to move into 5th place (where we need to be at the least if we are to stand a chance of getting through), with the top four having substantially more votes (as many as 620).

Lines will be open from now until the gig on 28th August. If you can help us by dropping us another vote by texting "Midlands 3014" (without quotes) to 64343. (Please note: 16+. Texts cost £1.00 plus standard network charges. Please get permission from the bill payer. Customer services: festival@surfaceunsigned.co.uk? or contact us on 0800 434 6076)