As you probably know by now, the Soniq Stars app is under intense development, and in order to validate our upcoming product and solve any potential glitches and problems before it gets released, we decided to give our contests idea a run on our main communication channel, Discord.

Of course, even on Discord, rules are a necessity and this document deals exactly with that. Anyone who doesn’t abide by these rules is likely to get banned from contests and even risks getting kicked off our Discord channel. Plus you’ll hurt my feelies.

Rules of Engagement (ROE)

The strict ROE for our Discord contest is “Don’t fire, even if fired upon”. Inappropriate jokes, sexist, racist, chauvinist and pretty much any behavior ending in “-ist” that’s commonly known as “don’t be that guy” adds fuel to the fire and, as such, will most likely result in a permanent ban (permaban). At Soniq, we’re nurturing a loving, respectful and fair community that goes hand-in-hand with the world of music. Collaboration always before animosity!

#support

Don’t get discouraged by bad people. Our admins will take care of them, but we can always use your help. Contact us on our #support channel, or contact me personally on Discord to take a look at and sort out a potentially inappropriate situation. I’ll be your knight in the white satin armor (maybe a T-shirt with a day-old coffee stain), here to defend you from evil trolls.

Furthermore, no nudity and hateful behavior is allowed. Such videos will be subject to permanent ban from Soniq. Be polite, decent and genuine.

“There is no better way to disarm a douche than by killing them with niceness. Or, you know, by calling your friendly neighborhood Community Manager, so…”

~Nikola Tomic, Soniq Community and Content Manager, 2018 AD

Application Rules

-Vocal cords only

First of all, this is a singing contest. This encompasses everything from rap to yodeling, as long as you use your vocal cords for it and as long as it isn’t plain talking (hehe) or spoken word poetry. We all know what using your vocal cords for music entails.

-English only

Secondly, singing must be done in English. This is our decision for at least the first round of contests. Yes, this does include all English dialects.

-One video per contender

Every single contender, no matter how they got to our Discord is only allowed to upload a single video of their choice. Should you happen to upload more than one video, we will delete all entries that exceed the one-video-per-contender limit. This is all for you, really; by uploading more than one video, you’re impairing your own chances of winning — better to rile up all the Soniq Logo reacts on a single one, than have them scattered across multiple entries.

-Share YouTube video, add Soniq emoji, pin it

There is no specific application process for Soniq Discord contests. All you really need to do is upload/find a YouTube video of yourself singing that you’ll send to the #contests channel on our Discord, regardless of whether the contest has officially started (the #contests channel is already in place).

After you’ve done this, add a Soniq logo react emoji to your video (you don’t have to do this, but, you’ll see that this is vital for your video’s success) and pin it for easier browsing. Again, this is for boosting your chances of success. After doing this, you’re pretty much done, as far as we’re concerned, just wait for the contest to begin if it hasn’t started yet.

-Promote yourself

Of course, we recommend that you share your video, along with our Discord channel with your friends, acquaintances and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) followers, so that you can get more traction. As mentioned, the application process for our Discord contests is simple and pretty much straightforward. We will be sharing some of your videos while a contest is in-progress on our social media as much as we can, but we recommend that you take charge of your own marketing and share your talent on your social media. After all, the goal of Soniq Stars is getting your name out there and helping you get paid better. Self-promotion is an invaluable skill to own.

Voters

-Voting

We’ve come up with a rather interesting way for you guys to vote. The voting on Soniq’s Discord contests will be done using the custom Soniq logo emoji that we’ve prepared for you. Just click on the emoji option next to a post and find the “:soniq:” emoji.

-Reporting unauthorized content

As voters, it is your duty to report suspicious behavior and videos. If you suspect that a video is non-authentic, explicit, illegal, or bad in any way you should immediately report it to me, your Community Manager, or any other admin or Soniq team member. We will carefully review your report and decide what to do. If the behavior/video you’ve reported on turns out to be truly inappropriate, you can rest assured that you’ll be rewarded. You are our neighborhood watch and our content curator; being vigilant pays off!

-Soniq’s curators

As we mentioned (especially me) numerous times, we really do need your help! This is why we’ve decided to reward you, our valued community member, for being vigilant and helping us curate our content. Budget for rewarding community members who helped us curate the content (reporting videos etc) or helped us in any way in the process of organizing the contest is 100$ in SONIQ (total). The admins will split this 100$ to vigilant community members (curators) based on how valuable their contribution was.

-Referrals

In order to pull in more potential contestants, we’ve decided to come up with a referral system, where the Discord users get rewarded with $10 worth of SONIQ (at the time of writing this, that’s roughly 500 SONIQ) for referring a brand new user who joins our contests. Here are the details on how to refer people to our Discord.

-Promoting Soniq

But we aren’t done with useful rewards! Independently from the referral system, we’ll be issuing 100 SONIQ rewards for anyone who shares our official Soniq post on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Obviously enough, this is the way people who aren’t singers can earn their SONIQ — by spreading word about us all across social media. However, the contenders, too, can share our link on social media, as well as invite their friends to support their contest video.

*Celebrities*

If you happen to bring a celebrity to our Discord, you’ll get some extra SONIQ for this effort. What constitutes a celebrity? Well, there’s no real measure for this, to be honest. Whoever you happen to bring as a celebrity (a famous singer, actor, YouTuber, streamer, etc.) will be checked out by our team and if they’re famous enough to meet our standards of ‘fame’, you’ll get your extra reward! If this celebrity happens to join as a contender, welp, you guessed it, more SONIQ for you!

Contestants

-Share YouTube video on #contests

The #contests channel is already open for your submissions. Although our first contest hasn’t started yet, you can feel free to share your video, if you don’t feel like waiting. Of course, voting (reacting) will be blocked until the contest has officially started.

You can, by all means, share your YouTube video towards the end of the contest, but this will render you less likely to gather a significant number of votes.

You will be able to publicly see how many votes you’ve earned at any time during a contest.

The moment a contest is closed, a bot that we’re working on will take a snapshot of the posted videos and note the results in the database, in order to prevent voting past the contest deadline. This means that all the votes that occur after the contest is over will not be accounted for. This all, will, of course, be shared with you. Transparency before everything else!

-Self-promotion

As mentioned earlier, self-promotion is more than welcome regarding our Discord contests. We suggest that you share our Discord server link along with a quick explanation on how to vote on your social media and your contest YouTube video. Don’t be reluctant about spreading the word about your contest participation. We suggest that you steer clear of being spammy towards other people on social media, so that you can bring genuine voters more efficiently and effectively, but this is all entirely up to you — what you do on social media is none of our concern, provided you don’t spread false rumors and bad rep.

-Authenticity

So, what’s to stop you from uploading a video of Celine Dion singing live, pretending you’re her? Well, apart from the fact that you’re probably not a celebrity lookalike, what’s stopping you is our team of ruthless contest detectives. Each and every single video will be thoroughly checked.

If you happen to upload an old video of yourself singing (which is completely legitimate and allowed), you can expect us to contact you personally in order to check for authenticity. If you happen to record the video for the purposes of a Soniq Discord contest, you might want to mention the word “Soniq”, if you want to avoid being contacted by us for authentication. This is too, entirely up to you, but if we don’t have obvious proof that you’re the person behind the video, you can expect us to check up on you, which is absolutely fine by us!

Likewise, our community to report suspiciously inauthentic content — we are building a self-curating environment and you guys are the pioneer curators!

As far as Soniq is concerned, we don’t care if your video has been a part of another contest. We renounce any responsibility regarding this, and you are completely free to share such a video, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Terms & Conditions of the other contest it has been a part of.

-Early birdies

Every and any Discord contest participant (regardless of whether and what they’ve won), will be invited as an early-access user to our immensely awesome, ridiculously cool, massively online talent show app that we’re working on — the Soniq Stars. There are some sweet & juicy treats in store for all you early birds.

Prizes

Here’s the real way you can earn your SONIQ. Although the prizes will be given to the first three places (based on the Soniq Token vote count on Discord), everyone who participates in a Discord contest will get paid something in SONIQ (remember, you can always vote for yourself, too).

-First 3 places

First of all, the prizes for the first 3 places will be as follow:

$256 in SONIQ tokens — 1st place

$128 in SONIQ tokens — 2nd place

$64 in SONIQ tokens — 3rd place

In case of a tie, all tied contenders get the full reward for a particular place.

The prizes will be paid out in SONIQ using the exchange rate at the moment the contest ends.

-Other contenders

In order to encourage you to step up and free yourself of any doubt and lack of confidence, we’ve decided to give prizes to anyone who managed to win any votes. We’ve decided to set aside $256 to pay out everyone (other than the first 3 places) based off of their number of votes (in percentage). Again, keep in mind that you can upvote your own videos, because we want to reward everyone for being brave enough to step forward and join in!

Likewise, these prizes will be paid out in SONIQ using the exchange rate at the moment the contest ends.

So there you have it, all you basically have to do in order to earn SONIQ is upload a video of yourself singing on YouTube and share it on our Discord!