First thing's first. Don't ask people what they like, they won't tell you.


Second thing's second, don't worry about if people like it or not. Chances are, nobody's taken the trouble to put the music into the game and see how it plays. Maybe your composition wasn't really fleshed out enough for someone to do that, and you can take the blame, if there's any to be had. But maybe it was fleshed out enough, and nobody did it. Game music isn't like radio music, or album music, or even movie soundtrack music. You can't listen to it in isolation and predict how it's going to work in the game. You have to test it ingame, or else you don't know how it's going to work out. You have to hear it with the cycle motor, the turn noise, the explosions, the stupid announcer, the whistle, and all that stuff. You have to see how it works when you're storming the fortress, or capturing the flag, or just core dumping all you see. Until you've done that, you haven't really heard the music. So for you musicians, you need to do that before you post it anyway.

And that's why, when it comes down to it and you're making your masterpiece, you don't waste any of your time or creative effort trying to satisfy people with music they like. They don't have to like it. To be quite honest, in isolation, the music in the movie Tron is some of the worst music I've ever heard. In the movie, though, I love it. What's the difference? (Yes, I'm so old I used to own the Tron soundtrack on vinyl, bought it soon after seeing the movie in the theater) What matters is this:
What really matters is how it plays in the game.
I direct you to another open source game that is very fun, Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid. The music in that game is composed of mod files downloaded from the internet. They worried about matching it to the action, and that's it. Play the game for awhile, then listen to the music itself in isolation. See the difference?
So what do people want in armagetron? I've studied this question off and on for several years, and here's what I've come up with:
* Fast music
* Rhythmic music
* Slow music
* Melodic music
Yep, it's contradictory. Ask someone who doesn't drink wine what kind of wine they'd like you to make and see if you get a meaningful answer. Ask someone who doesn't fix cars but does drive them what kind of turbocharger to install on yours and see if you get a meaningful answer. There are a lot of musicians around here, and you'll get useful answers from all of them, but the vast majority of folks here won't give you good answers. Have I made that point strongly enough?
Here's the part about what you should do:
First, make the music. Make a track that spans 2-4 minutes and loops. Test it ingame using either your favorite media player, or the embedded media player in 0.3.0. Tweak it, work on it, etc. Then put it up and see what people think, as suggested before. That's one approach. It might get you results.
Or you can remember that while most of the people around here aren't musicians, many of them are programmers. That means that if given a specification, they can easily test your finished product to see if it meets the requirements given. If you want to go that route, here's what I suggest:
Get the latest trunk code from bzr or subversion. Look around for information on how to do that. Listen to music that's already there. Also get 0.3.0, there's a different opening track in there to listen to. Yes, it's true, I made most of the music you'll find. There's also a track in there by a guy who used to post here, Raoul Duke, called When the Glass Breaks, iirc. Listen to the two opening themes, the Fortress Walk, and When the Glass Breaks at a bare minimum. If you have 0.3.0, play it. You'll have to bind some keys and kickstart the ingame music manually, but it does work. See how it works ingame. The two ingame tracks that are there were developed more like programming and less like music.
When you've done all of that, you'll have learned a few things, hopefully. In general, I've had people who've tried 0.3.0 tell me they liked the opening track, but I think in general people hate it (which they've told me also). I think only one person to my memory has told me they didn't like the fortress walk, and lots of people said they liked it. Nobody's commented on anything else, except that Raoul Duke got a lot of positive feedback about his track (and very little negative feedback).
This is as close to a specification as we're going to get. I'd like to see 3-4 themes expressed in several different ways: a rock track, a speed metal track (think: Iron Maiden), a funky track like the Fortress Walk, a slow pop track, and that's probably it. I'd like sonic compatibility between them. That sounds weird, but it basically means that every track has to be able to segue smoothly into every other track. The easiest way to do that is to keep the same arrangement of instruments for each track. So if you burn them all onto a CD, it should sound like an album, more or less. It should not be a patchwork of songs and ideas that conflict with one another! The 3-4 themes should include a march, a soaring victory noise (think: INdiana Jones), a dirge, and a love theme. Also consider adding other themes, or crossing some of them, etc. Each theme, and each expression of the theme, should be able to follow one another arbitrarily and randomly. That means you have no control over whether the funky dirge will follow the speed metal love song.
It may offend your artistic sensibilities to create music to a specification. If that's the case, then I'd suggest you shy away from making game music completely. The only difference between a programmer and a musician in a game project is the tools they use to develop the game.
When you've got a track to submit for approval, ask yourself what kind of approval you're after. The long-term plan is to make soundpacks and musicpacks, similar to moviepacks, that people will be able to download as resources and use as they like. So, is the approval you're after "default music distributed with the game"? Or do you just want to know you're loved? If the answer is the second, don't worry about negative reactions to your music, and get with the developers to talk about what the sound engine should look like. If you're actively making music for the game, you will have a great deal of input into how the music engine will work.
If you're after some sort of approval to put it with the game, you're going to have to GPL the work. Period. No discussion is available on this. Of course, what that means for music is a little trickier to define, so I'll be satisfied if the final mix is GPL to be compatible with the game license. But if you made a mod file, or a midi file, you better be prepared for people to load it up in their favorite tracker, change it around, and redistribute it. Expect people to take samples they like and use it in their own music. That's what GPL is all about. 'nuff said.
If you're ok with that, great, post your music here, make sure you state very clearly that you're after inclusion in the game, and you'll get developers to listen to it. Point them to this post to remind them they have to test the music ingame to make a credible decision.

There are a lot of reasons we might turn down a music submission, and very few of them deal with our own opinions of the music. We've got to worry about the size of the download, cpu usage, etc. We have to deal with having it in our SCM repositories, and that means regular bandwidth we have to deal with. It may very well come down to half of us preferring one submission and the over half preferring your submission, and the two together are too big. It goes without saying that we'll turn down anything that's a straight up rip of the movie music. Don't waste our time with copyright infringing music, we've got enough problems already.
