Finding work

A gig is posted by a venue or an organiser: they have a date and a stage, and they need somebody to fill it. A collab is posted by another artist: they are making something and need people in it.

The five kinds of gig:

Audition / Casting

Reviewed privately, one person picked.

Gig

A single booking. One artist wins it.

Contest

Public. Claps, shares or views decide, sometimes with a jury.

Open mic

Public. A line-up rather than a winner.

Residency

A recurring slot, usually tied to an event series.

The five kinds of collab:

Collab

A creative project. The poster picks a few people to talk to.

Pickup

Somebody needs a spot filled — a session player, a sub, a member. Demo required.

Opener

An opener for a specific show, on a specific date.

Jam

A casual session. Not an audition — you say you are in.

Cypher

A freestyle circle. Claim a spot.

The ring on an open call compares the poster's requirements with the tags on your profile. Sphere carries about half of it, genre most of the rest, then sub-genre and instruments.

Anything the poster left out is not held against you — its weight is shared across what they did ask for. So a low score usually means a genuine mismatch, not a missing field on their side.

1. 1Open the call and read the brief. It says what they want to see and how many spots there are.
2. 2Attach a demo. Some calls require one, some make it optional, and a jam or cypher asks for none.
3. 3Write the cover note. Keep it to why you fit this particular call — it is read next to everybody else's.
4. 4Send it. It appears under your applications, with its status.

On a private call — an audition, a gig, a residency — nobody else can see who applied, including the other applicants. The poster reads submissions and may share them with their own team for review. People they share with can read; they cannot vote on you or change your status.

You are notified when your status moves. Being shortlisted also opens a message thread with the poster, so questions can be asked before anything is locked in.

Open calls are matched against where you are. With no location set there is nothing to match, so the nearby rails come up empty and stay that way no matter how much else you fill in.

Discover is a catalogue. Pick a sphere, a genre, an instrument or a venue type and you land on a page about that category — the artists in it, their work, the open calls attached to it, and the next level down.

From a sphere you can narrow to a genre within it, which is as deep as browsing goes. Past that, search takes over.