I give out a small unofficial award for some of my favorite original songs in English that are part of the Open Mic contest. How do I participate? * Make a valid entry to Open Mic. * Make sure the title makes it clear that the song is original and in English or an instrumental. * Be someone other than me. (Sorry Spanish musicians. You guys are great but I don't understand well enough to evaluate the songs.) Everyone I select gets these prizes: * A full upvote from me on their post. * Their portion of a 12 SBD prize pool, depending on number of winners. * One more full upvote if they comment on this post. I gave out a bunch of extra upvotes to people this week, cause I'm about to delegate a big chunk of my SP, so might as well vote down one last time before HF20. So the comment upvotes won't be as nice. As usual, author rewards from the combination of this post and my entry make up the prize pool, so if that goes over 12 SBD there will be a second round after the posts pay out.

Three winners this week:

"Queen of Her Realm" by @yidneth
A ballad! Or at least a mini-ballad. I feel like it should have like eighteen more verses to be a true ballad. But even so, a harpist, and a ballad, and a waterfall, and really what else do we need?

"Just a Tale" by @nadabrahmasounds

Oh, right, we need Hernán Suárez. I need to go listen to more pantam music by other people to figure out how much I'm a sucker for the pantam and how much it's Hernán. The little I've listened to makes me think that while pantams are cool, it's at least 80% him.

"House of the Justin Sun" by @cryptobreakfast

I gave an award to a song about crypto, played on a ukulele. Doing this always seems to come up with something unexpected. But "Excuse me, I meant, to say borrowed" and "Spend your fiat on copied whitepapers" killed me.

I've occasionally pondered starting a parody song contest, as I love them and they don't quite wholly fit into any of the existing contests - I'd want people to be able to enter without an instrument, which you can't in Open Mic, but as original songs they don't quite fit the karaoke contest either. We had two this week, the one above and a parody of "The Gambler" by @skycorridors and @deanlogic.

Is there interest in doing that? It wouldn't have to be crypto-related, and in fact I'd encourage it not to, since a lot of what we get here seems to be that subject.

Open Mic Support

I have a challenge for other people to do just what I'm doing here: create a nonprofit curation post featuring songs that you love from Open Mic and giving the post rewards to the performers. I'd really love it if we could get a whole bunch of these going. Basic details are in this post. I'm pledging a 100% upvote to help get your posts' growth started, and to make sure you get something out of it, I'll buy you a @steembasicincome share (worth 0.5 Steem) every week you participate. Feel free to take my format or create one of your own. Mention me in the post, or come to the SBI Discord where I have a channel just for this project, or hit me up on the Open Mic Discord or anywhere else you happen to see me. The tag for this project is #openmicsupport

Hey! Before you upvote this post!

**If you want to upvote because you liked the songs, go upvote *their* posts!** (If their posts have paid out, see if they've commented here and give them an upvote.) If you want to upvote this one *also* that's fine but please reward the songwriters first.