Taxi >> Composer Competitions ?

[superblonde]

I get regular feedback from formal composition professors that I should submit to composer competitions. Many of these contests are set up by music foundations or academic institutions or orchestral performance organizations and have 1st, 2nd, 3rd place prizes of $200, $100, $50 type range. Oddly, many of these composer competitions also have entry fees typically of $20. Professors strongly recommend avoiding competitions which require entry fees. There is no feedback given on submissions or status update for entrants. The number of entries might be anywhere from 100 to 1,000 to 5,000 entries. Not good odds. The cited benefit is mostly that, "it will look great on your resume to have won a composer competition."

In recent years the VST vendors have sponsored their own types of composer (more like producer/arranger) competitions for scoring short films and TV trailers. Spitfire is running one now. Last year they had 11,000 entries and there was a quite the controversy over their 1st place choice. These are free to enter. Since the entries appear on social media, there is some random social media feedback and social media viewership gains. The prizes range from simple name recognition, to a simple VST plugin worth $100, to a huge VST package worth $5,000. (Gotta pay tax on that, right?) Some of these contests come with Terms of Use which grant all rights in the known universe, for all entered music, to the sponsor.

Then there is Taxi. There are weekly listings to submit in many genres. Each listing accepts unlimited submissions. Each submission costs $5. Each losing entry comes with terse rejection feedback. A "winning" entry is not subject to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place ranking, as every suitable submission is a "winner". The winners go into a new pool, where a music supervisor might choose the submission for royalty earnings, essentially "winning the award". Each winner is granted specific contract rights. The final prize in the form of placement royalties may never appear, or may take 5 years to appear, and range anywhere from $1 to $10 to $100 to $500.

Did I get that right?

Now considering the above choices 1, 2, or 3, I can't fathom why I would spend much if any time on composer competitions, or certainly not any time on VST scoring competitions, when instead the effort could be spent on Taxi submissions. My conclusion is that Taxi >> Composer Competitions.