I'm excited to announce that AIM 2025 is starting Friday, April 18!

What is AIM?

The Art-Inspired Music Contest, or AIM for short, is a yearly music contest that runs here on Newgrounds. Participants find a piece of art on the Newgrounds Art Portal and compose music inspired by the art within the given time period. After submissions close, a panel of judges will evaluate all the entries, and the winners get put into a compilation album on the AIM Bandcamp!

Schedule

(All times based on Pacific Time)

1. Preparation period (NOW up until April 18) - Get hyped and start preparing for the compo. Volunteer to be a judge, suggest/donate some prizes and/or create some promo art (details below)!
2. Submissions period (April 18 - June 16) - You will begin working on your entries and submit them. A submissions thread will be opened in the Audio Forums once you are allowed to start working on your entries, thus signaling the official beginning of the submissions period. (The actual time start will be April 18 12:00 AM PDT, but please look out for the submissions thread when it is posted, along with an announcement in the Newgrounds Audio Pub Discord server.)
3. Judging period (June 16 - TBA) - The submissions period will close, and the judges will evaluate all submissions on a simple points-based system. The top 20 tracks will be featured in the compilation album, and there will most likely be prizes for the top 3. Everyone else will have a chance to vote on their favourite entries to determine the Fan Favourite winner whose track will close out the compilation album.

Help Needed!

The contest HAS NOT STARTED YET, so DO NOT start working on your entries. Leading up to the submissions period, I need some help to make this compo happen:

1. Judges! - A handful of users are needed to help listen and evaluate the submissions to determine the winners. We need at least 3 other users who are over the age of 18 and ideally have some experience with reviewing music on Newgrounds or participating and/or being involved in other Newgrounds music contests.
2. Promo Artist! - We need 1 user to create some promotional art that will be used in the submissions thread and as cover art on the compilation albums.
3. Prizes! - Last year, I used some donations and some of my own funds to purchase some Soundpaint gift cards as prizes for the top 3. I am looking to offer the gift cards again as prizes this year, so if anyone is interested in helping to contribute to that, please let me know. You can also donate other prizes or suggest other prizes that could be offered to the winners.

For any of the above, you can leave a comment on this post, DM me on Newgrounds or join the NG Audio Pub Discord server and find me (Random-storykeeper) in the #aim-general channel!

What can you do now?

While waiting for the submissions period to start, there are a few things you can do now:

• Search for art inspirations - You can start looking around in the Newgrounds Art Portal for any potential pieces of art you might like to use as your inspiration for your entry. Just don't start working on the actual track yet.
• Get scouted - One of the requirements of AIM is that participants must be scouted in the Audio Portal. If you are not a scouted musician yet, now would be a good time to try and get scouted so you don't have to worry about it when you submit your entry. You can read about scouting in the Audio Portal here!
• Ask questions! - If you have any questions about the contest, feel free to post your comments here and I'll answer them when I get the chance. You can review last year's submissions thread for an idea of what the rules will be like. Most of them should be the same, but please review the AIM 2025 thread when it comes out proper as some rules may change.

You may also wish to join the NG Audio Pub Discord to get announcements on important contest dates like the start of the submissions period.

See you there!

I look forward to seeing familiar and new musicians joining AIM this year. Last year was the largest turnout for an AIM I've hosted ever, with 118 entries! Can we possibly surpass this? 😏

In the meantime, you can also check out these 2 AIM curated playlists:

Previous AIM Entries

Personal Favourites

This is a little list of AIM entries that have stuck with me. It is not in order and subject to change, but it has a lot of music that I really love from AIM over the years.