About two months are left to the release of Shine Together, our fifth charity album!

Thanks to the tremendous work of the music community, the ongoing Seeds of Kindness 3 fund-raiser together with our three previous fund-raisers have raised about $150,000 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

The Charity. 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 (LLINs). 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.

Half the world’s population is at risk of malaria. In 2012, about 627,000 people died of the disease, the equivalent of four Boeing 747 crashing every day with no survivors. On average, one person dies of malaria every minute. (WHO 2013)

LLINs are mosquito nets, usually bed nets, that not only physically protect against malaria-infected mosquitoes but are also treated with an insecticide that lasts for several years and in that time kills any mosquitoes that may otherwise be able to find possible gaps or tears in the net. At a price of just about $3, bed nets are a thoroughly proven, highly effective means of protection against malaria. Depending on the region they also protect from other diseases transmitted by the same vector species, such as dengue fever, yellow fever, and forms of encephalitis.

The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), founded in 2004, supports local distributors by funding the hundreds of thousands of nets that are needed in LLIN distributions. AMF stands out because of its strong commitment to transparency and self-evaluation. (From Your Siblings’ summary of AMF.)

Here is a TEDx talk by Dr. Toby Ord, the founder of Giving What We Can, explaining effective altruism and the logic behind our choice to support a highly effective charity such as the Against Malaria Foundation.

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 user name, and include the following:

1. An MP3 file without the artist’s name in its title or meta data, 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!

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