Joseph Miller's Blog

Last week I decided to have some fun and post a request on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for people to sing songs for cash.  I asked for 20 original songs at 50 cents apiece and ended up receiving 12 valid entries and 3 bogus ones within the 7 days I allotted.  Please have a listen below and let me know in the comments which is your favorite (if any).  Also, if you’d like to remix or sample them I’ve posted mp3 and wav archives of the “original masters” below the songs.  Enjoy!

“And That’s You”

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“Ba Do Ba Do”

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“I Want 50 Cents”

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“In a Form of Love”

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“Kolluthe”

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“Love Is Coming”

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“Mabey Was Herothsoon”

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“My Dog Chico”

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“Ocean Township Library”

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“Sing in the Rain”

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“Spaghetti Hats”

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“You Are So Wonderful To Me”

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Download complete archives in mp3 format (~8 MB) and wav format (~80 MB) and let me know if you do anything with them.  Read my previous post if you are interested in some tips on optimizing your own Mechanical Turk projects.

Ever since The Sheep Market, I’ve been curious about exploring the potential of Mechanical Turk for fun little tasks, rather than it’s main purpose as a brutally cheap and efficient marketplace for repetitive tasks.

My own silly idea was to pay people a relatively fair wage of 25 cents to record themselves singing short improvised songs.  I posted a request for 50 HITs with the minimal requirements that songs must be between 30 and 60 seconds and uploaded directly through Amazon’s interface as wave files.  After posting the HIT around 11 at night, I received one cute song almost instantly and went to sleep excited that the assignment would be completed by the morning.

By the way, if you’d like to skip my Turk tips then click here to go straight to the songs.

I checked the progress before leaving for work the next morning and was bummed to find that I hadn’t received any more songs at all. I thought that I might have been too stingy at 25 cents, so I closed the order and submitted a new one for 20 songs at 50 cents. Once again, I got a song almost straight away. Maybe price wasn’t the major factor?

Then I started browsing MT from the worker’s perspective and realized that my little task was likely not very discoverable within the pool of thousands on tasks (51,405 as I write this).  With such little monetary reward at stake, I pictured workers gravitating towards the first reasonable tasks presented to them, much like how searchers generally click the top handful of Google results.

Besides search and tags, MT provides the following ways of sorting tasks (“HITs”):

-Creation Date (Old to New)
-Creation Date (New to Old)
-HITs available (Fewest)
-HITs available (Most)
-Reward Amount (Least)
-Reward Amount (Most)
-Expiration Date (Soonest to Latest)
-Expiration Date (Latest to Soonest)
-Time Allotted (Shortest to Longest)
-Time Allotted (Longest to Shortest)
-Title (A to Z)
-Title (Z to A)

I put the options you can reasonably try to optimize for in bold.  The Creation Date sorts pass quickly and you can’t stop and start your projects at will without paying a 10% penalty, so unless you are comfortable losing some brutal efficiency it’s not an option.  I ended up was a couple bucks figuring this out.  You can’t post a massive order to get to the top of HITs available since Amazon requires that you pre-pay for your tasks, and you can’t get to the top to the top Reward Amount page without paying 5$-10$ per task.  Before you get too excited about making some folding cash, go check a few out. The amount of work required for some is absurd. Think ‘write a 5000 word essay’ or ‘transcribe 30 minutes of audio’. The hourly rate for the top paying projects is probably worse than most of the cheapies.  As you might expect, there’s a perpetual tie for the Least Rewarding task at 1 cent although there’s actually a couple totally free tasks on top right now for some reason.

Finally, we get to the easy wins. Time allotted can be cranked up to a few weeks if you aren’t in a hurry.  Most turkers are reliable and want fast cash, so an overly long deadline is not really a deterrent.  The current leader has allotted 20 days for workers.  On the short side, the minimum time you can allot is 60 seconds.  If your task is doable in that amount of time, it will likely get you on the top page.  Title is another east one.  Just browse the current top A to Z task and tweak their format $+number format.  To get top page on Z to A, start your task with the letter Z (duh).

All that said, it’s probably not a coincidence that Amazon put the easily gamed sort options toward the bottom, but there’s no downside in trying my suggestions to increase your exposure.

Here’s some other fun Turk ideas that may not exist:

-tag your flickr photos
-tag and organize your music and media collections
-create a frame by frame animation, each based on a previous turker’s drawing
-photoshop contest, like a low, low budget layer tennis

Don’t forget to check out the songs the Turkers made for me!