Calling all musicians! Bronies for Good is organizing its fifth charity album, Shine Together, and we will be accepting submissions all summer long.

Thanks to the tremendous work of the music community, the ongoing Seeds of Kindness 3 fundraiser together with the two previous ones have raised over $100,000 from online donations alone, supporting various Your Siblings and Engineers Without Borders projects in Uganda, Burundi, and Tanzania. We incorporated a few suggestions and rule changes to make this work even better for the musicians, and we would like to ask for your help to support the outstanding work of the Against Malaria Foundation!

Soft deadline: November 22nd, 2014
Hard deadline: December 10th, 2014
Release date: December 20th, 2014

Charity status. There is no middle man. All the money donated will go directly to the Against Malaria Foundation and will only be used to purchase insecticide-treated nets. Donations will be tax-deductible in the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe. Each donation will be publicly allocated to a specific program and extensive tracking, predistribution, and postdistribution reports will be published online.

What changed. This album will operate on a pay-what-you-want basis and a free download for the album will be provided, so you may release your song as soon as the album is out. For the sake of musicians who submit their songs early, there is a set release date this time around. It does mean that we will get less breathing room to give feedback and help entries that are close to making the cut, so we recommend that you submit before the “soft deadline” to make that still possible.

What you can submit.

1. It does not have to be pony: Pony and nonpony songs are equally welcome.
2. Remixing and sampling: No copyrighted material can be used, and we cannot accept entries that remix, sample, or cover the show either (sorry, we really can’t). Submitting a remix requires the composers’ permission. Collabs are encouraged!
3. Theme: There is no specific theme or genre restriction besides common sense. Don’t make anything angry, creepy, or overly depressing (but sad is fine) and your song should have no problem fitting in.
4. Length: There is no set length restriction, and most importantly, short songs are just as welcome as longer pieces are. Don’t stretch your song solely to fit a given length – this was perhaps the most common issue with entries for the previous albums.
5. Number of entries: You can submit as many songs as you want (within reason). Two songs from the same artist can get in without any problem, but over that number (not counting collabs), we might only take the best two of them.

How to submit. Please send an email to [email protected], with the subject “[ST]” followed by your username, and include the following:

1. An MP3 file without the artist’s name in its title or metadata, hosted on a service that offers streaming (preferably Mediafire or Box.com). Please make sure to take the sharing link rather than copy-pasting from your URL bar. You may check your link by accessing it while logged out, e.g., using private browsing.
2. A lossless file (preferably FLAC or AIFF) uploaded on a third-party hosting service, not sent as an attachment. We tend to see a lot of Dropbox links dying when we need them, so please be careful.
3. Your preferred artist name and a link for credit (YouTube channel, Soundcloud, etc.).
4. Lyrics, if applicable.

You can upload your song on YouTube when the album is released, but please do not make your song public until then. However, feel free to upload previews or ask for feedback!

About on the charity. Malaria affects over 200 million people and kills between 600,000 to over a million each year. As its vector species bite at night, the disease can be easily prevented by the use of cheap, long-lasting insecticidal nets. Indeed, as little as $3 allows the purchase of a net that will protect two people on average for three to four years, and the efficiency of these interventions has been thoroughly proven. The Against Malaria Foundation stands out in particular because of their strong track record and commitment to efficiency, program monitoring, and transparency. Right now they are running a distribution of 676,000 bed nets in the Democratic Republic of Congo that will protect about 1.2 million people from the disease.

If you have any questions, you can email us at [email protected] or ask in the My Little Remix thread.