Hear ye, hear ye: The Colorado Music Business Organization is holding its second annual Songwriting Contest! Winning songs will be submitted to *real* music business companies. There will be NO CA$H prizes. Do you have a song you have written and five ($5) dollars laying around not doing anything? Read on because this contest is for YOU!! Currently paid COMBO members can submit one song at no charge as well!
Contest staff will put the winning songs on a compilation CD and hand deliver to publishers, record companies, music supervisors, and others, that have agreed to accept them, along with a cover letter telling a little about COMBO and about each of the songs, like who the writers thought the song might be good for, i.e., this country song is good for Luke Bryan.
Judges will be a variety of professional people who might buy your music but who also work in some area of the Music Business. A Committee of at least five judges, none of whom write songs but are music lovers, will have the final decision. Last year’s judges included a scout for a record company, a publisher, a radio DJ, a public school music teacher, and a music blogger.
The songs will be presented for judging “anonymously” – the judges will not know the name(s) of the songwriters or even the name of the song. Song submissions will be presented to the judges as a number (i.e. Song #113). Email confirmation of accepted entries will have our song registration number FYI. Please make sure that Meta Data is not included on your entry.
NO “BAD” WORDS! Failure to follow this RULE will disqualify your song. If you wrote your song with a “must have” naughty word, please mute the word on the mp3 track and write (bleep!) on the lyric sheet (we will only accept songs for the contest that are “Radio Ready”).
Examples of judging criteria will consist of (but not be limited to) – Do the lyrics ‘hit you in the heart’? Does the melody bring out some emotion such as: passion, solitude, love, excitement, danger? Do the lyrics express a ‘new thought’ or have a really catchy phrase?
Please submit Songs with Lyric Sheets as attachments to songcontest@coloradomusic.org in MP3 format so that contest staff may forward to each judge to listen to from the privacy of their own homes. Names of the judging panel are confidential and will not be shared even with each other so that the judges can not communicate with each other to get opinions.
We’ll consider the best 3-5 songs from each of 10 basic categories: pop, rock/rockabilly, alternative, country/western/bluegrass, blues, folk/Americana, jazz, rap, instrumental, and “other”. “Other” could include reggae, dub-step, holiday, etc.
18-20 Top Scoring songs overall will get a slot on the compilation CD to be given out.
Please note: Songs will be judged ONLY by lyrics and melody, not by production quality or the vocalist.
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