FAQ

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS

• Entrants must be 50+ years of age by 31st March 2023.

• You can enter from any country in the world, but prizes are only available to residents of the USA, Canada, UK or EU. 

• The formats accepted are: video or audio file of your song – phone recordings are fine

IMPORTANT DATES

• Enter from Jan 1st 2023

• Closing date 31st March 2023

• Winner announced Mid/late May

IS IT REALLY FREE?

• Yes. The competition is completely free to enter and on January 1st everyone who pre-registers will be emailed a direct link to submit their song.
• Alongside the competition we offer an extremely low priced companion membership site to support the people who enter the competition, but it is an entirely optional extra.

ENTERING FROM AROUND THE WORLD

• We accept entries from anywhere in the world. However our main prizes are only available to residents of the UK, USA, Canada and the EU.
• ‘Awards’ are offered to residents of others countries with more than 100 entrants
• Our ‘award’ is a beautifully produced plaque to hang on your wall.

HOW ARE THE ‘ROUNDS’ ANNOUNCED?

• All entrants will be notified by email whether their song has passed to the next round or not. The first round takes the longest to judge as we are dealing with the most entries.

CAN I ENTER A CO-WRITTEN SONG?

• Co-writes are welcome, so long as all parties are over 50 by March 31st

DO I HAVE TO BE THE PERFORMER ON MY ENTRY?

• You may have another artist of any age sing or perform your song, as long as the songwriters are age 50+

IS THERE A FEE?

• This is a free competition, and no submission fee or voting will be required, donations towards the costs and the charities however will be welcome, but optional

WHAT DOES ‘ACOUSTIC’ MEAN?

• We want songs in their simplest form in order to separate the quality of the song from the production, so we are asking for your song as an acoustic demo. We will however accept songs at any stage of development.

HOW MANY SONGS CAN I ENTER?

• One per person, and anyone found entering more than that will be disqualified from this and all future competitions

IS IT OKAY TO BE A CO-WRITER ON MORE THAN ONE ENTRY?

• Yes. There is only one entry allowed per person, but if someone chooses to enter a song you co-wrote with them, they may do so and that won’t conflict with your entry.

WHY DO YOU ASK FOR DEMO’S BUT ACCEPT FULLY PRODUCED TRACKS?

• Our judges are instructed to disregard ‘production’ and to make their judgement based on the song alone. They are able to do this because they are qualified professionals from the best music universities in the world as well as acclaimed celebrity judges.
• The reason we accept all tracks is to make it easy for people to join this competition with whatever recording they already have, whether a demo or a fully produced track.
• A well produced ‘bad’ song does not become a good song, and a badly produced ‘good’ song is still very clearly a good song. Production can have a huge impact on how a song is received but are judges are exclusively listening to the songwriting itself.
• If this competition becomes very large in the future we will consider; Exclusively asking for acoustic demo’s made only for this competition, Setting a theme and asking entrants to write an original song, Creating genre categories for entries. For now though, we are happy with how things are.