My Songwriting Contest Experience

In my prior blogs, I shared with you 10 upcoming songwriting contests and the benefits of entering a songwriting competition. Now I'd like to share with you my own experience.

I will never forget the first time I entered one of my songs into a songwriting contest! I was at my very first music conference, the Babbie Mason Music Conference, a gospel music songwriting contest. This contest was my very first songwriting contest ever. Songwriting for me was, and is, at times, a very personal thing for me. I was hyper-sensitive about exposing my songs to people until recently. But nevertheless, I decided to shed my song-shy ways to enter this contest.


And the song I entered I just knew was a hit! I loved singing it. Me and the guys who worked on it, worked on this song for hours, days, months even. I wanted it to be perfect! We believed our sweat and tears made the song a hit. I just knew EVERYBODY who heard this song was going to love it. I was confident that this song was going to place at the very least in the top 10 songs out of 100. Being a type-A personality and an over-achiever, I placed high value on my scores and rankings. So imagine my shock when the top songs were announced and I didn't see my song anywhere on the list. Then when I got my song back, my song was returned with a score of 70 out of 100! Are you kidding me?! They basically said I failed!


I was crushed and hurt.

There were three judges who critiqued my song and each had something positive and negative to say about the song. Because I was hurt initially, I refused to listen to the critique. I didn't even want to finish going to the music conference! I didn't want to hear what ANY ONE of those judges had to say to me. They didn't know how much time, and money, and effort had gone into this song! So I started not to return to the conference at all. But listening instead to my instinct rather than my hurt feelings, I went back to the conference, humbled, and ready to listen and learn. Returning was the best decision I made as I learned some valuable songwriting tips, gained some resources now, and am a better songwriter because of it. That's one of the reasons why I encouraged you as I did in my prior blogs to participate in one of the 10 upcoming songwriting contests and gave you some benefits of participating in songwriting contests. I hope you will take my advice!

I want to help you avoid some of the embarrassment that I felt when I found out my song was not up to industry standards. So I'm going to be doing a series of blogs on how to critique your own song. So stay tuned!


Thedy B, Attorney/Songwriter
Hits A Million, LLC
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