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.