End of 2020 call to submit your favorite collab

Dear friends of wikiloops!

The end of 2020 is almost there & people are celebrating the holidays around the world.
I sincerely hope you and the people close to you are in good health and able to enjoy taking a breath "between the years", as these days between Christmas and new years day are called here in Germany.

If you happen to belong to the folks who are (like me and my family in Germany) currently subject to travel restrictions and shut-downs of anything public,
you will not likely go out celebrating the new year as you would usually do... so I have been thinking:

What could one do on wikiloops to give this quite odd end-of-year experience some positive twist,
and how could one involve the users (that's you!) in some way?
I guess my answer could be summarized to "Let them know they matter!", so here's my offerings to do that, and get you involved:

Let's showcase the tracks which mattered to us in 2020 in a brand-new way

I would like to invite you to submit your one most-liked track of 2020 to be featured in a wikiloops radio show, which shall go live on new years day 2021.
To make that radio show more than just a playlist of tracks, you are invited to add a spoken message to feature the track - pretty much like one would call-in at some radio station and leave a message on their answering-machine, requesting a track and greeting some folks.
I have coded a simple virtual answering machine thing for this purpose [edit: submission for 2021 is closed by now! Happy new year!] -
if for some reason you would prefer to record your message at home and send me the recorded snippet by email, I'd include that as well.

Let's go back over the tracks that somehow stuck out and leave a second signal

Many people on wikiloops share the impression that there is only a quite short time of interest in their tracks right after they have been uploaded to wikiloops.
There is truth to that, but the impression is also being falsely re-inforced by technical hurdles - since you can only give one "thumb" per track and may have done that already,
it isn't really possible to say "hey, I still come back to listen to this every now and then" with that functionality. What I would like to encourage us all to do is go back to a few tracks and leave a second comment. We might as well include a hashtag like #matteredToMe2020 in such comments, I just wanted to publicly hint at that option, because I know people receiving such comments will be genuinely happy, just as I'm happy for people leaving a comment on my blog here.

Last: Let me tell you why you matter

Now, I'll have to watch myself not to make this too long to read :)
You matter, because you are here on wikiloops. With every thumb-up or download, you are giving a supportive signal to some musician out there, and you can easily top that by writing a comment which shows you have actually taken time to listen closely.
If none of us did any of that, wikiloops would be a pointless experience, so, yes, that matters quite a lot.
If you share tracks on wikiloops, no surprise there: You matter! Without people willing to do that, we'd still be looking at the roundabout 300 tracks recorded by Baer & myself in 2011.
If you accept the rules of wikiloops: That matters! We have some rules concerning music copyrights and certain topics / behaviour which we consider to be out of bounds on wikiloops. To enforce these rules is not always a fun job, and your compliance to these rules is making things a lot easier, and keeps wikiloops enjoyable for a quite diverse audience. That matters, if we didn't have a user base that was supporting our way of operating this platform, we might as well give up.
If you choose to become a supporting member of wikiloops - that matters a whole lot. Hosting a project of this size and keeping the music streaming 365 days a year is a quite costly enterprise, and I am especially thankful I didn't have to do any "save wikiloops"-donation call campaign at the end of 2020. The supporting members saved us all from that, so yes, they matter a lot.
Last, I can't end this list without explicitly addressing a few very special people:
This goes out to Shi, OliVBee, TeeGee and wjl, who have handled 99.7% of the on-premises moderation tasks in 2020, giving me some free time to welcome my newborn son and take care of some other life things.
Can't possibly say how much that mattered to me in 2020, thank you so much.

Well, I'll leave it at this for today,
hoping some of you will get engaged in the planned radio show.
I'll keep you informed on when and where that first user-submission-assembled radio feature will go live.

All the best & stay happy & healthy out there
yours
Richard