The world-renowned CMJ Music Marathon is New York City’s largest music festival, attracting more than 120,000 music professionals, artists and music enthusiasts to the City every autumn. CMJ Music Marathon features 1,400+ artists performing live in over 80 of New York City’s greatest music venues October 15-19, 2013.

Last year CMJ booked over 300 Sonicbids artists to perform throughout the 2012 Marathon.

Have questions? Check out our interview with Matt McDonald, CMJ Network’s VP of Artists & Events. Take it from the bands that have played:

• “CMJ was our first experience where music meets business head to head. We met hundreds of people in the industry. We were even asked last minute to showcase for a major label in a private room. If you are in a band and things are getting serious you MUST play CMJ.” - Gentlemen Hall, CMJ 2010
  
  
• “Being an unsigned band from New York City, we were proud to be a part of such a popular festival. Getting to check out some of our favorite bands from all over the world was really great.” - I Love Monsters, CMJ 2010.

About the Marathon:

Since its inception in 1981 CMJ has been a springboard for the best new music talent from all over the word, discovering music’s future superstars years before their commercial breakthroughs. Artists like Arcade Fire, Feist, Justice, M.I.A., Spoon, Hold Steady, MGMT, Hot Chip, Daft Punk, Eminem, Red Hot Chili Peppers, R.E.M, Run-DMC, The Killers, Modest Mouse, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Green Day, Black Eyed Peas, Mars Volta, Jet, My Chemical Romance, The Shins, andFoo Fighters have performed at CMJ Music Marathon way ahead of topping the charts. All artists/bands who perform at CMJ 2013 AND have properly applied, will receive complimentary registration badges for all band members. 

Submit artists now for CMJ 2013 through SonicBids.

The deluge begins Tuesday when the 31st annual CMJ Music Marathon, which has grown into a five-day overload of musicians, begins with acts who are all hoping for some kind of attention: a record deal, a gig, a blog post, a tweet.

The payoffs of a career in music have grown increasingly uncertain, but there is no shortage of aspirants. This year’s official CMJ schedule lists nearly 1,400 acts: indie-rock, hip-hop, electropop, punk, metal, singer-songwriters, funk, reggae, disc jockeys, blues, even a little jazz. The marathon sprawls across Manhattan and Brooklyn, and across the Hudson to Maxwell’s in Hoboken; it runs past 2 a.m. nightly.

And that’s just the event organized by CMJ, the college-radio newsletter that began the annual showcase in 1980, and that also presents daytime panels on the music business for badge-holding convention-goers. Clustered around the CMJ Music Marathon itself are additional showcases, most of them free, presented by corporate sponsors, music blogs and anyone else who can line up half a dozen bands and rent a club for an afternoon. People who are used to hearing recordings free online can spend afternoons, Tuesday through Saturday, surfing live music on the Lower East Side – most conveniently in the strip of clubs along Ludlow Street – and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Bands that are in demand, and willing to knock themselves out, can literally perform day and night. Caveman, for instance, a New York City band that mingles sustained, moody melodies and walloping percussion, has 10 shows scheduled; it’s hardly the only one. The unoffical parties give bands a chance to build momentum, striving for that amorphous anointment as a buzz band. Will it be the hardcore of Trash Talk? The goth electronica of Zola Jesus? Thebillowing, new-agey hip-hop of Main Attrakionz? The somnabulistic shimmer of Memoryhouse? The dizzying electronic minimalism of Purity Ring? The guitar-distortion-meets-rap of Young Magic? Will longtime indie-rock troupers like Wild Flag or Eleanor Friedberger show the newcomers how it’s done? Perhaps none or all of the above.

There’s a lot of retro out there, from neo-Appalachian to neo-psychedelic to punked-up girl-group to 1980s synthpop to shoegaze. There are also new hybrids incubating, just waiting to claim their own -wave or -core or -delic suffix.

Article originally appeared on NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com) and was written by Jon Pereles.