We are no longer accepting applications to be a paid songwriter for our 2025 songwriter festivals, Red Lodge Songwriter Festival, Yellowstone Songwriter Festival, and the Livingston Songwriter Festival. If you would like to be considered for 2026 read on.
Paid Songwriters are professional singer-songwriters that play in the pubs and restaurants during the festivals. All performances are in a songwriter round format with two to three songwriters. Songwriters will play four to five shows during the festival. Our Songwriters are recruited at other festivals, by reputation, live shows, finalists from our annual songwriting contest, referrals, and direct inquiries.
We do not book songwriters through bookers or management companies.
If you are interested in playing our festivals in the future we encourage you to send us your information. Your information should include your bio, a CD of your current music, links to your web page, social media (Instagram & Facebook), Youtube videos and Spotify. Please do not send merch.
We will look at are your tour schedule, awards, other festivals you may have played, have you mastered your instrument, liner note on your CDs, the number of followers on your social media pages, number of monthly listeners on Spotify & Apple Play and Youtube videos.
We appreciate your understanding that we get hundreds of requests from songwriters to play our festivals. If we are interested in booking you, we will contact you. We only contact songwriters we are interested in booking, and due to the number of applicants do not contact songwriters when we don’t plan to book.
Many of our songwriters are discovered at our annual Rocky Mountain Songwriting Contest. Past winners include Liam Buel Slater, Michelle Rivers, Reese Sullivan, Dallas Remington, Goldpine (Ben & Kassie Wilson) and Daniel Neihoff, all regular songwriters at our festivals. The winner of our annual contest receives an automatic invitation to return to the Red Lodge Songwriter Festival the following year as a paid songwriter and the top five get strong consideration to play our other festivals. We will begin accepting songs for the 2025 contest on October 1, 2024.
Prior to submitting your information we encourage you to look at a map and see where Red Lodge, Montana, Cody, Wyoming and Livingston, Montana are. You are responsible for the expense of getting yourself to our host communities so be sure you know how you’re going to get here and the expense of traveling here before you apply.
Thank you for your interest.
- Mike Booth – Executive Director
- Rocky Mountain Songwriter Festivals
- P.O. Box 830
- Red Lodge, Montana 59068
