Armada Music was launched as a collaborative effort between Armin van Buuren, Maykel Piron, and David Lewis more than a decade ago. The brand has been a staple in dance music since day one, they have amassed a list of signees that include Tiga, Hardwell, Dash Berlin, W&W, Markus Schulz, Aly & Fila, ATB, and have created more than three dozen sub-labels to facilitate a steady release of radio-friendly main stage dance music. They're a pretty big deal.

And as far as remix contests go, we've really seen it all. Contests getting closed early with winners announced that entered only days prior and didn't have enough votes, or producers with affiliations to these contests getting an unethical win, but this scenario is a new one to us. It seems as if the production trio Chomstars won a remix contest that included a label release as the prize, and have been denied that release.

Their unedited story is below, followed by a free download of the track in question:

Hey music people, Chomstars here. So back in June we won this Beatport production contest sponsored by Armada and iZotope, hence our name up there in the "Grand Prize" spot. (Please refrain from listening to low quality stream of the unfinished version of the track there, the final version is a bit further down for you to download in HQ!) It's a pretty straightforward contest – 1) submit an original track, 2) renowned producer and film scorer BT picks a grand prize winner, and 3) said winner is rewarded nicely:

I still get hard reading that.

Anyway, when we found the contest we had a half done track in the oven called Granulation that we thought would be up BT's alley, so we went into overdrive to get it done on time. We weren't 100% satisfied when we were finally forced to submit in the 11th hour, so we didn't get our hopes up about winning too much. However, we knew we wanted to do something with the track even if we lost, so we spent the two weeks following the deadline making it perfect.

About four days after the winner was supposed to be announced (I've never seen a contest with winners announced on time) I woke up to see our beautiful name plastered across the "Grand Prize" spot there. And we even got a lovely slap on the ass from BT himself. Wooo!

Cue 10 AM shots and temporarily bringing back the high-five.

Within a week Beatport had emailed us for relevant information to collect our prizes, iZotope had given us the links to all the software we won, and Sounds To Sample had given us the sample library we won. Hell, iZotope even arranged for us to be interviewed on their site. Bro, sweet!

So far so good, but then a couple weeks pass with no word from Armada. Finally, after getting Beatport to prod them three weeks after the win, we get an email from a "Product Manager" over at Armada formally and succinctly requesting the WAV master and a short radio edit. A little cold but whatever, I didn't expect them to pee themselves with excitement like we did. We quickly make a radio edit and email him the latest and greatest master. I append a question asking if he has any clue roughly when this will be released so we can plan around that. Weeks pass, and meanwhile some very talented video people have contacted and met with us to discuss making a video for Granulation, so we begin moving forward with that.

‘cause fuck us, right?

Product manager seems a bit preoccupied to say the least, and I'm starting to sound like overly attached girlfriend, so we pump the brakes on this and focus on some other music. He’ll realize he misses us eventually right? Right??? Guys?!?!

Well, he didn’t. After a couple more weeks I reached out to BT, and his assistant quickly contacted them for us. Obviously Armada didn’t take long responding to that, but they just said they were “busy planning the release.” Ok. Then a week later, after two months of no contact with us, I finally woke up to a lovely email notification on my phone from a new Product Manager at Armada regarding “BT Challenge”. Was this the moment we had been waiting for? I rolled out of bed and opened the email to find out.

Nothing wakes you up quicker than a swift kick in the balls.

Welp. That sucks. Obviously we were not happy. A release on a label as large as Armada could have been potentially huge for our career, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The rest of the day was spent trying to take a step back and calm down, while incessantly reviewing the fine print of the full contest rules [https://support.beatport.com/hc/en-us/articles/201046534-Beatport-Terms-and-Conditions#contest]. Of course there’s a lovely clause in there releasing everyone who has anything to do with the contest from any liability – not that we have the resources to pursue the matter legally anyway.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them. #bummer

I guess at this point I should stop and say that we have been in the contest game for about 3 years now. We know there is sort of a talent-leeching overtone where the participants are really at the mercy of the contest holders and sponsors. We have also experienced varying degrees of poor management by contest holders in the form of neglecting to meet their own deadlines, fully cancelling in the middle of the contest after hundreds have submitted, forcing you to whore yourself out on social media to get ahead, and forcing you get your friends to like their social media pages to give you votes - all that among other sketchy practices that scream “we care about this a lot less than you guys do, deal with it.” Now that is all good and fine. Seriously. Contests are still a really cool way for new artists to get discovered, and they are usually pretty fun. As an up and coming producer you have to deal with a lot of BS from a lot of sources, and not letting that get to you is a part of the game. What we haven’t heard of is a contest sponsor blatantly refusing to give the winner the prize they worked their ass off to earn – especially after keeping them hanging on the line for months with no contact, and ESPECIALLY when an extremely respected producer and DJ on their roster publicly chose the winner. I mean, was BT wrong?

We mulled everything over for a while, and by the next day I had cooled off enough to pen a response.

Take that…?

Well, I wish I had a gripping conclusion to this tale. They simply never responded, and we haven’t heard from them since. I guess if there is a lesson here it’s that the contracts you implicitly sign when taking part in these things pretty much let the big guys walk all over you. We’re not saying that it’s a common thing, we’re not saying it will happen to you, and we’re certainly not saying that contests are something you should avoid on Beatport or elsewhere. On the contrary, we have greatly enjoyed participating in most contests and think they have done a ton for the community. In fact, the Beatport ones have been known to put real talent in the spotlight regularly. We are simply saying that this kind of potential behavior is something you should be aware of if you are going to participate – especially if Armada is involved. It’s a shame too; Armada was one of the labels we had the most respect for before all this.

Meanwhile at Armada…

So here is that free track you were waiting for. Feel free to tell us if you hate it and think Armada was right to metaphorically bitch slap us. We’re big boys. We can take it.

TL;DR – Armada HATES puppies. Here’s free music:

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, we uploaded the full transcript of all of our contact with Armada, Beatport, and BT’s helpful assistant Lacy here: http://i.imgur.com/jphimuk.png