When music festivals take artist applications: a month-by-month calendar

Most festivals that take artist applications open them once a year, for a few weeks or a few months, and then shut the door until the next cycle. Miss the window and you wait a year. The calendar below shows when each festival in the directory usually opens and closes its call, taken from the festival's own application page, so you can plan a year of applications instead of finding out about each one the week after it closed.

How festival applications usually work

There are two kinds of festival in this list, and they behave differently.

The first is the showcase festival or music conference: SXSW-style events like The Great Escape, Tallinn Music Week, Sled Island or Folk Alliance International, where discovering new acts is the whole point. They run a formal call, usually through a form on their own site or a platform such as Submittable, Groover or Amplead, with a hard deadline and a selection panel. The competition is real. Tallinn Music Week says a record 3,589 artists applied for its 2027 edition, and it expects to pick around 180.

The second is the regular festival that also books some acts from applications, often for daytime stages, a local showcase or an emerging-artist slot. CMA Fest takes applications for its daytime stages only. Falcon Ridge Folk Festival runs a separate Emerging Artist Showcase on Submittable. These calls are smaller and quieter, and they are often the more realistic way in.

Big headline festivals mostly sit outside both groups. I cover those further down.

The calendar

Each festival is listed under the month its window usually opens. Where a festival only publishes a deadline, it sits under the deadline month instead. The first two groups are worked out from today's date, so they always show what is coming up next.

Patterns worth knowing

Summer festivals book in the autumn and winter. If a festival happens in June, July or August, its call usually runs somewhere between September and February. Sled Island in Calgary says its applications open in October and close in February every year, for a festival in June. Buckle and Boots in Greater Manchester runs from 1 September to 8 January for a festival at the end of May. If you only start thinking about summer festivals in spring, most of the good calls have already closed.

Some windows are short. Rudolstadt in Germany keeps its stage-act window open from 1 August to 30 September, every year. Sŵn in Cardiff ran its 2026 Apply to Play scheme for two weeks in July. A two-week window is easy to miss, so I set a reminder for the month before a festival usually opens, not the month it closes.

Year-round inboxes still have a cutoff. TD Toronto Jazz Festival accepts submissions all year, but only the ones that arrive by 15 December count for the following summer. A handful of festivals, such as Sweden Rock Festival and Reeperbahn Festival, keep a form open with no stated deadline. Those are worth sending to at any point, but expect silence unless they want you.

Many festivals only reply to the acts they pick. The Great Escape says that if you have not heard back by 31 March, the application was not successful. Toronto Jazz only notifies successful applicants. Silence after a deadline is normal, and chasing it rarely helps.

Check who is eligible before you spend the time. Ireland Music Week is for Irish acts only, with at least one member from or based in Ireland. New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival says about 85% of the acts it picks each year are Louisiana-based. Rudolstadt asks acts who have played to wait three editions before applying again, and Folk Alliance International has a similar rule for its Official Showcases. Reading the small print first saves you a fee and a rejection.

Fees vary a lot. CMA Fest says applying is always free, and Green Man Rising is a free competition. Treefort's most recent call was free early on, then cost $10, rising to $20 in the final two months. Where there is a fee, applying early is usually cheaper.

How I'd plan a year of festival applications

1. Pick ten to fifteen festivals that genuinely fit your genre, region and stage of career. A local porch festival or a regional jazz festival with a real open call is worth more to a new act than a long shot at a headline event. 2. Put each festival's usual opening month in your calendar, a month early. The windows move a little from year to year, so treat the months here as the pattern and the festival's own page as the final word. 3. Keep a festival-ready kit: a short bio, two or three live videos, your best recordings, a stage plot and tech rider, and recent show history. Several calls ask for all of it up front, and the ones with short windows do not leave time to film new live footage. 4. Apply the way each festival asks. Mile of Music says email and social media submissions are not reviewed. Camp Punksylvania asks bands not to submit by email at all. A form-only festival will not move an emailed pitch to the front of the queue. 5. Write down what you sent and when, so you are not guessing next year about which festivals you already tried.

Festivals that do not take applications

Plenty of large festivals are booked entirely through agents and invitations, and they say so. Bonnaroo says it does not take performance or artist submissions, because its talent team looks for acts all year. Boston Calling says it is not an open-submissions event and has no application process. Big Ears says it does not accept unsolicited submissions to perform. Their profiles are marked that way, so you can see at a glance where applying is pointless and where your time is better spent.

The way into those festivals is indirect: get on the radar of the booking agents and managers who place acts there, and build the show history and audience they look for. The booking agents directory is the place to start on that.

Festival profiles on Heard show the usual application window wherever the festival publishes one, with notes on fees and eligibility and a link to the festival's own page. The festivals directory lets you filter to the ones that are usually taking applications around now. Members also get the application form or submission contact for every listing that has one.