Why must all competitions have age limits?

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I would like to get other members' thoughts and opinions on this, and I'll try not to rant excessively. As an aspiring (often struggling) professional I'm always on the lookout for competition opportunities. There are many, but I have yet to find any serious competition without strict age limits. People older than 30 (maybe 32) are not allowed to enter.

Why is this? I understand the excitement of finding young promising talent, but what's wrong with older and more experienced talent? The message I get from this is if you have not achieved some success and recognition by your early 30's you are just out of luck. Too bad, nice try, but your career is beyond hope so no one is interested. Good luck teaching and playing weddings.

If competitions are really about finding the best talent, give everyone a chance regardless of age. Let the young hotshots and the older veterans go head to head. Other instrumental competitions are not so strict, and no one seems to mind.

Ok, rant over.
 

happyrat1

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I think the idea is to promote YOUNG talent.

Chances are, once you're past 30, you're pretty much established in your own personal niche in life. Your typical starving artists are usually in their teens or twenties.

If you're over thirty or forty and still banging your head against the wall trying to get a record deal, then chances are you're overdue for ECT therapy and it's time to find a REAL job :D

Face it, if you're over thirty you either already have a day job and a mortgage or at least car payments and some sort of established line of credit.

Then there's also the face of pop music these days. Excluding old C&W coots like Willie Nelson or starving R&B artists and Jazz players (Who all basically chose the express route to bankruptcy to begin with ) 95% of broadcast radio these days consists mainly of teenage autotuned girls and boy bands and street thugs whose main talent is the ability to dance like Astaire while lip synching to their studio tracks. :D

Likewise, if your genre is classical, everyone is astounded by a four year old delivering a flawless performance of the Brandenburg Concertos. A forty year old geezer, not so much :D :D :D

So depending if you are talking about pop music here or classical or Chicago Blues or C&W you are really comparing apples and oranges.

Willie Nelson and Billy Ray Cyrus will be honored and respected til the end of time because their audience respects age and true craftsmanship and artistry, while artists like McCartney and Bowie and Keith Richards have become the butt of senior citizen jokes, despite all their hundreds of millions (which they earned mostly before age thirty) ;)

I just gave a quick listen to your soundcloud page and have added it to my list. You really are very good. But if you're over thirty and still looking for your "big break into show biz" it may be time to take a serious inventory of your life skills and ask yourself where do you see yourself going in the next thirty years.

Sure you've got idiots like Kanye and Jayzee living the high life with mansions and cars and all the other stuff from the Beverly Hillbillies theme, but for every one of them you have a thousand Mel Schmendricks and the Meltones playing the Airport Hilton 5 nights a week while selling insurance to their neighbours by day.

This is not to say that Mel is not a brilliant musician and not extremely talented, but somehow the big record deal never materialized and they never made the contacts to get their stuff into the public eye.

The people I REALLY feel sorry for are the one hit wonder bands like Blancmange or Missing Persons who had one or two top forty hits, then ended up exiled to playing one hick town after another in greasy nightclubs, working for scale and sentenced to play their "recognizable hits" over and over and over again til they either end it all with a bullet to the head or finally grow up and get a business loan and open a ganja bakery in Colorado. :D :D :D

What I'm saying is, be careful what you wish for. Getting it could be the worst thing that ever happened to you :D :D :D

Gary ;)
 
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I've never really done competitions in my latter years, but OP did remind me of a "battle of the bands" comp I was in way, way, way back with an original blues band I played in as a young feller.

We got knocked out by a rock covers band who did a cover of "April Sun in Cuba" by NZ band Dragon. I'm not sure they were any better than us, but gee their (female) lead singer was way more attractive than our (male) lead singer and was happy to show off her "qualities" to best advantage. I also think the soundy was worried we'd blow up his dodgy PA, we were rather loud and clueless.

Suffice to say the front bar crowd appreciated our competitors' advantages appropriately, and we were consigned to the scrapheap while they progressed to the next round.

I was rocking a Yamaha DX9 at the time...what an abysmal keyboard that was. The comp was great fun though.
 

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