Hey Marc
Glad you got your song up on Ourstage good luck....
Here's how work it suposed to work from the horse's mouth so to speak..
How does the ranking engine work?
The ranking or judging is done via two patent pending algorithms that serve up top ranking, middle ranking and relatively new uploaded material in a channel in "somewhat" random fashion for someone to judge.
When we say somewhat, we mean that we take care of serving up the material in a fair and unbiased fashion. We are watching very carefully to make sure that each item in the channel gets equal exposure--we guarantee that. Whether that happens in a particular judging session, though, is another matter.
Depending on how much our users like something (rank it favorably), and how long they want to keep on ranking, the ranking engine will try to get the user to discriminate how much more an item is liked over other ranked items, and thus, the reason why users may see what appears to them as the same item coming up during several battles.
Our site users who judge cannot request what material they will be served to judge. During judging they have to view or play the material served, and at a minimum, they have to screen an item for 15 seconds each before they can rank one item over another.
Then, all of the rankings from all of the users are taken together and the ranking engine bubbles up the best items to the top!
Here's a link to the FAQ on ourstage.... http://www.ourstage.com/about/faqs#faq465a
I'm still not sure of the "Fairness" of it all myself
Ark