One of those posts that is really more for me than it is for you.

I've been trying to decide the last couple of days whether or not to submit the piece that lost at Yale to enter a New York Contest. Normally, it wouldn't be an issue at all -- I have no problem with entering music contests, win or lose -- but in this case there is an entry fee of $20 for one score, and the prices for winning are only $300 for first, $200 for second, and $100 for third.

So what I needed to do, I decided, was to think about this logically. The Yale Glee Club contest, with no entry fee and with a larger price, had 70 entrants. So let's guess, offhand, that this contest will have close to half that -- maybe 40 on the high side. Let's also assume that whatever piece I write will be in the top half of submissions that they receive (because if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be writing music). Let's assume that everyone in that top-half bucket has an equal chance of winning one of those three prices. Thus, my expected gross profit per entry is:

$100*(1/20) + $200*(1/20) + $300*(1/20) = $600/20 = $30,

which is probably on the low side. However, about a third of that will have to go to taxes (since winning the BOTS contest has already pushed me over the self-employment limit), so my real expected gross profit is closer to $20-$25. My expected loss per entry is also just above $20 (the entry fee plus a buck or so for postage). In conclusion, then, since winning more contests does look good on my composition c.v. (especially without any documented education in that arena), I am leaning toward entering it, mostly because I really don't know what I'm going to do with that Yale piece otherwise. (The Meistersingers piece will work for at least two other bigger-money contests, for example, so even if I didn't win that one, I would save it for one of those rather than for this.)