Musical March Madness Reaches The Final Four ... <i>Finally</i>

Well, it wasn't easy ... but after a tsunami of votes so huge it crushed our third-party polling service — and a resulting four hours of technical difficulties that made us want to shatter our leg like Kevin Ware — MTV's Musical March Madness tournament is moving on to the Final Four!

Defending MMM champs Tokio Hotel, upstart Ed Sheeran, perennial powerhouses Thirty Seconds To Mars and Cinderella story Walk The Moon are the last four bands standing ... and one of them is going to hoist the big gold trophy next week. Who will advance to the 2013 championship game? Well, that's up to you: voting is now open in our Final Four matchups, and polls will close on Monday, April 8 at noon ET.

Of course, before we breakdown those matchups, we figure we should address just what happened in the Elite 8 ... in particular, the hotly-contested battle between Sheeran and Paramore. To be honest, we're not sure, though we suspect it had something to do with the sheer number of votes — more than 1 million, which is a whole lot of Captcha codes to enter — from fans of both acts that came flooding in over the past 24 hours. They either crashed our polling service totally, or caused such a gigantic bottleneck that only a few votes managed to get through at a time. We tried to contact the polling site in an attempt to fix the problem, but never heard anything back from them. So, we extended voting an hour, then created a second poll in the hopes that it would alleviate some of the logjam. To an extent, that worked, and a few thousand more votes trickled in. But finally, at 1 p.m. ET, we shut down the polls.

We know this was probably pretty frustrating to you guys, who have voted round after round, and helped make MMM 2013 an historic success. But we hope you can understand just how incredibly frustrating this was to us, too ... simply put, we love MMM, and to see it get screwed up so close to the finale, well, it sucks, pure and simple. But, we've got to move on — there's a trophy to hand out next week — and, after counting the votes from both polls, it was Sheeran that came out on top, by a final tally of 547,969 to 539,241 (here are the screen shots for proof). Oh, and at the time of this writing, we've yet to hear back from our polling service. Thanks guys!

So, for the Final Four and the MMM Championship, we're going to be using our own polling software ... and we're gonna be watching the votes to make sure there's no cheating (settle down Aliens, we've got you). So let's get back to the business at hand: Four bands are left in our 2013 tournament, and one of them is going to win it all.

Can Tokio Hotel make history as the first band to repeat as MMM champs? They'll have to get past upset-minded Ed Sheeran to do so ... and let's just say Ed's not sweating this one (shoot, he's never even heard of his Final Four opponents). And on the other side of the bracket, Thirty Seconds To Mars look to finally make good on years of tournament promise — three-straight trips to the Sweet 16 — and bring a championship to their Echelon, but they'll have to figure out a way to defeat the underdoggiest band in the land, Walk The Moon ... who have shocked us all by knocking off the likes of the Foo Fighters and Fall Out Boy to make it to this point.

We'll be bringing you in-depth analysis of those matchups over the weekend ... right now, let the games begin! We're so close to the championship, and you'll determine who reigns supreme as the baddest band in the land. Forget about technical difficulties ... It's Final Four time!

MTV's Musical March Madness tournament reaches the Final Four! Voting is now open in all matchups and polls close Monday, April 8 at noon ET, at which point we'll head to the MMM Championship Game. All winners are determined by your votes, so if your favorite act made the cut, it'll be up to you to guide them to glory! You can spread the word on Twitter using the hashtag #MMM — but get ready, it's gonna be a war.

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