The Vision

In our future vision for an annual Call for Entries & Competition, we imagine a program that is...

A call for communities to not only enter work, but to receive significant support back.

We want our Competition to offer a tremendous amount to participants alongside our annual awards and honors. Think: Opportunities to share work, receive feedback and mentorship, gain collaborators and colleagues in the audio field, expand the boundaries of the craft, and be heard by audiences worldwide.

A powerful showcase of our world in sound — one that meaningfully pushes the boundaries of audio and catalyzes new ideas, directions, and change in our industry.

To us, this means curating and platforming much more work than any other competition: Beyond our award-winners, and beyond even finalists. If we can continue to capture and highlight the breadth of quality and experimentation in the field, we can reflect back the medium’s artistic potential to makers and audiences worldwide.

A dialogue between audio communities and Third Coast that centers makers’ lived experiences as creatives, laborers, changemakers, and people.

Through the Call for Entries, we are collecting critical information from maker communities worldwide about their professional and artistic lives in order to shape future programming. Through this process, we’re envisioning more spaces for conversations between smaller groups within the audio community.

In this future, Third Coast’s annual Call for Entries marks the start of a brand-new cycle of an annual conversation with listeners and makers that stretches across each season. It's also an opportunity to collapse outdated models for industry competitions: historically narrow, hierarchical, and often inaccessible. In addition to naming annual honors and awards, we want to build a Competition Cycle in which every entrant comes away with something.

What if a Call for Entries offered its entrants so much more? We believe in the power of an accessible, worldwide & creatively-inclusive competition to provide for its entrants: new possibilities for convenings & community, whether that's mentorship or feedback, or an invitation to a live program, or newfound support from connections to audio peers. We imagine: more access to collective resources, the potential for collective advocacy, and other community-powered offerings that put audio makers first.

We’re charting a course towards this goal by piloting new Competition Offerings this year. We’ve started by initiating a feedback program for Best New Artist finalist, as well as evolving our Collective Pricing model to lower prices for entrants working in languages other than English. But we’re working on more — for this Competition cycle, and beyond. Please help us expand these offerings by filling out our first-ever Pilot Offerings: Community Input Survey! And as we go, we’ll be checking back in with you for your input. And if you believe your organization would be a good partner in these efforts to expand the competition, please reach out to start a conversation.