Creative Residency Open Call 2026
New music co-creation, 8 days, 3 artists in a room
Sofia, Bulgaria
SoAlive Music Conference will host the first CRESCENDO creative residency in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 9 to 16 October 2026. The residency will bring together twelve artists from different European countries and culminate in showcase concerts as part of SoAlive Music Conference.
Through this regional open call, four songwriters, producers or performing artists based in South East Europe will be selected to join the twelve-artist cohort taking part in the Sofia residency.
Eligible countries are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.
Sofia residency schedule:
• 9 October – Arrival of participants
• 10–14 October – Group work and studio sessions
• 15–16 October – Showcase concerts as part of SoAlive Music Conference
A capacity-building workshop will also take place during SoAlive Music Conference, offering participants practical guidance on a topic relevant to their artistic development.
Application Deadline: 1 September 2026
About CRESCENDO
CRESCENDO is a four-year project built around one very simple idea: put twelve artists from different European countries together for eight days, split them into four small groups of three, and see what they write.
Three times a year, once in Sofia, once in Gothenburg, once in Riga, we host an eight-day creative residency, each one with a brand-new cohort of twelve artists. You arrive together with eleven others, matched into a trio in advance through a mutual process, and you spend the week writing and rehearsing something new from scratch. Along the way, you take part in a capacity-building workshop on a topic relevant to artists’ careers. On the final day, your group performs live at the host showcase festival. Across the four years of the project, around fifty new musical “side-projects” will have been born this way – none of them with the same line-up twice. These new and unique “side-projects” will then get the chance to be invited to perform at the other partner showcases and beyond.
What happens to the songs you make?
The music you write at the residency doesn’t end when you fly home. The live sets are recorded. Images are documented. Mermaids & Albatrosses (Portugal), an independent, MERLIN-member distributor, releases the audio digitally, with 100% of net digital revenues going to you and your collaborators. CRESCENDO also looks after the proper publishing registrations, and MERMAIDS acts as your publisher, pitching the tracks to over 300 music supervisors worldwide for film, TV, and brand placements. MusicBloom (Italy) helps your project circulate to other European festivals. WARM (Denmark) handles radio plugging. FACTORY-92 handles promotions and communications. And throughout, you’ll have access to capacity-building workshops on how to develop an artist career, management and internationalisation, music publishing (how to effectively look after the song rights), synch (how to license your music for film, TV, ads and games), metadata literacy (learning the music publishing acronyms and their importance), smart artist websites pooling together your digital presence in a useful way as well as other relevant topics identified by artists, for artists. This capacity building component is led by Networking Music, FMC, .MUSIC, and VALUNODE.
What about your rights?
You keep everything that matters: Your masters are yours. Songwriting splits will be documented for proper registrations. If you already have a publisher, nothing changes. If you don’t, Mermaids Publishing offers a transparent publishing deal so the team can pitch your songs for synch and collect international digital royalties on your behalf via SUISA / MINT Digital. All your rights will be safeguarded and professionally looked after.
Who’s behind it?
Twelve independent music organisations across ten European countries, co-funded by the European Union under the Creative Europe Programme.
Who is it for?
Songwriters, producers, and performing artists based in a Creative Europe country who want to write across borders and bring their music into international circulation. Gender balance is mandatory across every working group. CRESCENDO aims to foster the development of music careers, not just for the new side-projects that are created, but also for the individual artists that participate in CRESCENDO – you tell us what you need!
If that sounds like your kind of week, we want to hear from you.
The project is co-funded through the Creative Europe ’25 Programme of the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.
