Thirteen listings did not run in the opening batch. Here is exactly why
he desk opened with eight live cards and one archive record. Getting to those meant reading thirteen other opportunities in full and running none of them, and finding three more sources we could not read at all. That ratio is the product, so here is the arithmetic behind it, patterns only — we publish what a term said, not who said it.
Eleven of the thirteen failed a gate. The most common failure was not a clause; it was an absence. Six briefs across two public boards described the buyer only by category — “a publisher”, “an exclusive music licensing company” — which leaves a songwriter nobody to look up, no track record to check and no one to hold to the deal. Some of those briefs set out their deal terms in real detail, splits and all; what they will not tell you is who is on the other side of it. A seventh brief named its organizer plainly and then put the submission price behind a login, so there was no fee to print on the card. That is the entire hidden-fee problem on a single screen: we do not flag a fee we cannot see, we simply cannot fill the field, and a card with an empty fee is not a card.
The rest were quieter. A long-running regional contest with four decades of published winners lists “monetary awards” and never says how much — real cash, unpublished amount, so the prize field could not be filled honestly. A licensing agency’s submission page had no window and no terms on it at all. Two cycles were simply shut: a camp sold out for the year, and a contest whose own page says it is closed for entries with no next opening date published. And two residencies were the wrong kind of programme for a songwriting desk, which is an editorial call and not a gate.
And one thing that did run is worth naming as a pattern too, because it is the reason every card carries a date. One contest’s rules page and its own home page stated two different entry fees on the same afternoon. Neither page is wrong exactly; one of them is just older. Both numbers are quoted on that card, with the date we captured them, because the alternative — picking the number we liked and calling it the fee — is how a checked listing quietly stops being checked.