Music for Humanity — the fourth annual song writing contest.

A fourth-annual contest run by a volunteer charity in the Hudson Valley, and one of the few on this desk where the whole arithmetic fits in a sentence: $25 to enter, $1,000 for the best song, $500 for the runner-up. The fee is 2.5% of the top prize. There is one price, no category surcharge and no tier that rises as November approaches.

The judging is named rather than described. Three volunteer judges — Jon Stein, Sharon Klein and Don Sarlin — are listed on the contest page with a biography each: a folk broadcaster of thirty years’ standing, a songwriter who signed a publishing deal in her early twenties and has written over 200 songs, and a guitarist who has toured with Van Morrison and David Bromberg. The page also states plainly what that buys you: “By entering your song, you agree that their decision will be final and there is no appeal.”

Production is expressly not judged — “a phone recording is fine as long as it is clear” — and the winners are announced in a room rather than in an email: the honorable mentions are read out at the organizer’s free monthly concert night in Campbell Hall, New York on December 19, 2026, and the winner is interviewed on a radio show in 2027. What the page does not do is say anything about rights in an entered song, and this card reports that silence rather than filling it.