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Participants are expected to follow the rules, the RAC team may be more lenient on some rule breaks compared to others, but it is best that you carefully follow all rules when taking part. Judges also have the right to refuse a mark on your work if they believe it breaks the rules of the contest.

1. Your submission can be of any music genre or style, however, any lyrics or samples used in your piece must be referenced. STRICTLY NO VOCAL OR COPYRIGHTED SAMPLES!
2. The work you submit must be your own composition. Newcomers to the contest must take screenshots of their DAW as they produce their track. This is to avoid fraud entries, which ruin the experience for everyone.
3. Your track must be between 3:00 minutes and 4:00 minutes. In extreme circumstances we will allow ten seconds over and under, any more than that and we simply cannot accept you.
4. Only one act can apply for each country, if the country of your choice has been taken you can offer to collaborate, but we will need PM's from both accounts to confirm the collaboration.
5. All tracks must be in by the deadline. Participants are advised to regularly check their NG inboxes and emails as we will need replies from applicants on certain matters. The more you reply the more we can help you. If you have a problem with reaching the deadline contact NeonProject in advance or send us an email (not the day before) and we may be lenient. Communication works wonders with events like these and you get a lot more respect from the team if you do so.
6. Submissions must not contain racism, strong language or any other material seemed offensive.
7. All submissions must provide proof of research on that country to back up your piece. This could be a news article about your country, an article about a native musical movement or simply a collection of songs from that country which inspired your work.

Picking A Country

Due to a high turnout previous contests. The RAC team have had to limit how many entries can take part in the final. The final will consist of a maximum of 30 acts, the highest 5 countries from the last contest have automatic qualification into the final countries list, the other countries listed are randomly selected from a large list of countries, you must select one of the 30 listed countries if you want to take part. . A submission confirmation date has now been introduced. On the 20th February all acts must confirm that they are working on their tracks, any newcomers to the contest will be required to provide their screenshots at this date. Confirmation is put in place so we can see who is committed to the contest and what people are working on.

Accepted, Hold and Banned

If you are in the accepted area your submissions has been completed and approved by the RAC team. If you are on hold, we are waiting for you to either complete your track, make changes, provide research material or provide DAW screenshots. If you are in the banned list your entry has been rejected, this can happen if you break a severe rule. As you are representing a country not only are you, as an artist, banned, but the country is banned from the contest too.

The Scoring Process

On results day points are given for each category, the points given will be; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19 and 24.

The judges score each piece in the main categories out of 10, all the scores are then added and the highest scores allocated the points above.

The Categories:

Representation: The way your piece reflects the country, whether it's the choice of structure, instrumentation or musical style. The easiest way to gain points here is through lyrics and the choice of instrumentation.

Evidence: Contestants will be required to hand in evidence. This is to show the research artists have gone through in order to deliver their sound. Judges will be marking the quality of the evidence and how well the research can be noticed in the musical piece.

Originality: Arguably one of the most challenging categories. Does your piece use those dreaded cliché chords? You have no chance here. Originality means that your piece stands out from the rest and offers a new taste to the Judges pallette.
Instrumentation: How well does your instrumentation fit together, is it layered well? Is it suitable for your style?

Musicality: Harmonies and melodies are catchy and sucessful. Chords match with all notes and there is nothing out of place.

Entertainment: Although opinonated, it would be pretty unfair to judge a music contest without scoring the entertainment value. Make sure your piece isn't long winded and an that parts change before the listener gets bored.

Consistency: The above categories for each artist will be added up and divided by the number of categories they were judged on.

Exterior Points

Judges are not the only people who determine the outcome of the contest. All participants will be seperated into blocks of 3 (People in their running order area). Each participant will be invited to select and rank their top 10 entries of the contest, they will not be allowed to list anyone for their block in the votes. Each block is then totalled and the points allocated, just like the Judges categories.

The following shows how much each scores system is worth in the overall result:

Judges: TBD
Finalist Blocks: TBD