Before You Start : Check Out Who Has Used SoundCloud for Contests

Previously used by the likes of MTV, Moby, Exit Festival and The London Science Museum to name but a few, SoundCloud offers a variety of different options to assist you in running a contest, each with their own different benefits to suit your needs.

Use a Group for your Contest

Host your original track on SoundCloud, give away your song parts and use a SoundCloud Group to receive the contest entries - each mechanic can be embedded into any website, Facebook app or Webdoc!

• Create a group specifically tailored to your contest. Make sure you add a logo, description and more info such as deadlines, prizes and links to other relevant pages on the web
• If your contest is for remixes or re-imaginings you’ll need to upload your song parts or stems to your SoundCloud profile as a set. Add the original track in the with the stem set and ensure you add relevant metadata and make your set public, downloadable and streamable to enable embedding
• Grab the embed code for your Group Dropbox widget, this can be embedded anywhere. When contestants click the DropBox widget they are redirected to your group where they can submit their sound. You can opt to receive an email notification when a new sound is waiting for your moderation
• Remember, if you’re running an unsigned artists contest or simply want to collect submissions for a crowdsourced project, simply embed the aforementioned Group Dropbox Widget into your web space!

Take a look at this example from Labrinth putting the Group Mechanics into practice in this Webdoc...

For more info on groups check out our Groups 101.

The SoundCloud Competition App...

We recently launched a new open source submissions app which incorporates a voting platform, below are a couple of examples of the app from Mastodon, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and DJ Shadow:

The new features are as follows:

• SoundCloud account required for submitting, commenting, and voting
• Comments will be synced with SoundCloud
• Updated voting system
• The whole platform is mobile/iPad friendly via an elastic layout system Premiere caliber customization system for easy themeing

If you wanted to try it out the code for the app is available and free to use from the SoundCloud github.