The rumours are true: the Peoples Pop Polls are coming to an end.
I could go deep into the reasons for this and maybe later I will, but most of them are obvious, and the most important one is this: I always think you should stop doing something while you’re still enjoying it. I initially expected to be doing the polls for a few months, then I thought maybe 3 or 4 years, 5 at the most. We’ll end up – depending on whether Twitter dies on its arse before then – on 4. A good run.
More important than the WHY of the ending is the HOW.
All through the People’s Pop Polls the top 8 tracks in each poll – and a few others – have gone into POLLHALLA, a playlist of democratically selected greats maintained by the mighty Dan Perry.
The plan has always been to conclude the People’s Pop Poll Project with a final poll of polls where the tracks in Pollhalla battle one another for supremacy. The perfect name for this project came from regular Graham Meikle – RAGNAPOP.
We’ve a few more polls to go until RAGNAPOP is upon us. The latest it will happen is May – the 4th anniversary of me setting up the actual @peoples_pop account. So this post is about the run-up to that as well as the actual final poll itself.
THE ROAD TO RAGNAPOP: MAIN POLLS
We have a few polls scheduled before Ragnapop starts, each of which will send (as usual) a bunch of tracks to Pollhalla where they have the opportunity to compete in Ragnapop.
The World Cup Of 2015 is happening now – our one and only 2010s year spotlight!
The World Cup Of Animals is scheduled for mid-October. A menagerie of pop beasts will be unleashed. Nominations day for that is September 30th – this coming Saturday.
The World Cup Of 2003 is scheduled for mid-November. Our final historical year poll!
In December we will do UNPOLLED BANGERS FROM UNPOLLED YEARS – see below.
I planned for two more following this, which I’d still like to do, but I have to be honest. The voting numbers for 2015 have been very low – symptomatic not just of a low-interest theme but of a platform that’s degrading faster than anyone imagined. I think Animals and particularly 2003 will be better-subscribed, but at some point I have to ask myself – how much effort can I put in?
So I’m going to make a final decision on these after I see participation levels for Animals Noms day and the rest of the 2015 poll. Assuming they do go ahead…
The World Cup Of 2023 – our fourth annual look back at the year in music – will provisionally be in January as usual.
Black Pop History Month 1978-1981 will provisionally be in February, moving from its previous date of October to match US Black History Month rather than the UK one. As before, an A- and B-Sides poll will run simultaneously.
The final poll before Ragnapop will be a one entry per nominator poll called The World Cup Of Favourite Songs. More on that another time – it should be fairly obvious what it is!
THE ROAD TO RAGNAPOP: UNPOLLED BANGERS FROM UNPOLLED YEARS
We’ve also been running minipolls, which offer another route to Pollhalla for a smaller number of songs.
My original plan for this Autumn was to run something I called CRISIS ON INFINITE POLLS – groups from polls we never got around to running. Unfortunate external circumstances have meant I’m not going to have time to do this – instead the format will be reserved for a future LEAGUE OF TRACKS season.
Instead I’ll be running the Unpolled Bangers From Unpolled Years minipolls.
These will be tracks we’ve never polled from years which didn’t get their own poll by artists who are not already in Pollhalla. Many years will get multiple tracks.
We’ll pick these by open suggestion after we’ve done Animals nominations – there will be a year sweepstake, where you put your name in and a selection of years you want: you’ll get a year you can select a track from.
There will be a daily Unpolled Bangers match, and then the finals of Unpolled Bangers will serve as our Christmas Poll.
Ultimately, once Unpolled Bangers, Favourite Songs, and whatever main polls we do are done, it’s…
RAGNAPOP
By this point we will have 450-ish songs in Pollhalla. Ragnapop will include c.256 of them.
So before Ragnapop itself we’ll work out what actually gets into the competition. Ragnapop will include:
- The Top 3 from each A-Side poll we’ve run (c. 135 songs)
- The winner from each *full* B-Side poll we’ve run (eg the BPHM B polls, the Christmas stocking) (c. 4 songs)
- Generous helpings from Unpolled Bangers and Favourite songs (c. 16 songs)
That leaves roughly 100 slots to be decided.
20-25 of them will be decided by PRIZE WINNERS in the remaining polls, who will get the chance to put a track through.
The rest will be decided by a big ballot launching during the end stages of the Favourite Songs poll (with a fairly limited entry window, cos I will want to get Ragnapop moving).
Finally, parallel to Ragnapop we’ll run the Ultimate Golden Beat, a one nomination per person mini tournament where you can put forward your single favourite discovery across the 4-year history of the polls.
And that’s all!
Meanwhile, a lot of the People’s Pop Twitter community are winding up on Bluesky, which is sadly poll-free for the forseeable but is beginning to pick up some good music (and other) chat. It’s far from impossible that some kind of organised fun will happen there in future. If you’re a PPP regular and need a code, let us know in the comments!