AI Music Video Contests 2026: Where to Submit an AI-Generated Music Video

That gap is the whole strategy for anyone cutting visuals to a Suno track: the dedicated festivals are small and close fast, while the volume sits in general AI film festivals that quietly added a Best Music Video category in 2026 and get a fraction of the entries their film categories do. What decides these entries is rarely the visuals. " Every deadline, prize and rule below was checked against our live contest database on September 9, 2026.

The two festivals built only for AI music videos

The AI International Music Video Festival closes September 30, 2026 and screens in Hollywood on November 14. It is run by The AI Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and takes entries through FilmFreeway. Its official site defines four accepted kinds of work: music videos using AI for visuals, animation or editing; music created or enhanced with AI tools; fan-made AI music videos; and concert visuals and immersive AI-driven video art. The award list is unusually granular for a festival this size, splitting Best Use of AI in Music Composition from Best Use of AI in Visual Creation, then adding Best Music Video, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best AI-Human Collaboration and Best Student or Emerging Creator. Winners get Winners Circle Guild membership, which carries free tools and a private filmmaker channel. Horizontal and vertical both qualify, and the accepted-tools list names Runway, Sora, Veo, Suno, Luma, Kaiber, ElevenLabs and Stable Diffusion.

The Global AI Music Video Awards, or GAIMVA, runs on Festhome with a January 1, 2027 deadline and a $1,000 prize pool. It accepts a wider spread than any other entry here: fully AI-generated, AI-assisted, hybrid human and AI, animated, narrative, experimental, performance-based, vertical and social-format, and student music videos. Two of its rules do real work. Every submission must have a responsible human submitter who can identify the human creative contribution behind the project, which GAIMVA defines as direction, concept, editing, music, performance, design, prompting, selection, arrangement, production or final creative control. And failure to disclose meaningful AI use may result in disqualification, so under-claiming your AI usage is as dangerous as over-claiming it.

The AI Song Contest closes September 27, and prompting alone is disqualifying

The AI Song Contest is free, open worldwide, and pays $1,000 plus flights and accommodation to its award show in Bangkok on November 29, 2026. It is a song contest rather than a video contest, so no visuals are required, which makes it the cheapest way to test an AI music workflow before you commit to a video edit.

Its eligibility rule is the strictest on the calendar and worth quoting to yourself before you enter. Per the contest's own submission page, entries "for which the only human input involved is prompting" are automatically disqualified, and submissions relying solely on prompting without audio editing are rejected. Teams compete rather than individuals, and no human contestant may compete for more than one team in a given year. A complete entry needs the submission form, a process document explaining the AI methodology including tools used and training data sources, team imagery, song cover art, and an audio file as MP3 or WAV at 44.1 kHz and 16-bit. Write that process document properly, because five other festivals on this list want a version of it.

Twenty-seven general festivals now award music videos

Rome AI Festival closes September 10 and screens at Cinema Adriano on September 19. Its third edition awards Best AI Music Video as one of seven categories, entry starts at $9, films run up to 20 minutes including credits, generative AI must be a significant creative component, and winners may be featured on the festival's Escape.ai channel for twelve months. Non-English films need English subtitles, and the entry form requires an AI statement of 100 to 300 words.

AI Film Festival Japan closes September 30 and screens at Tokyo Innovation Base from October 31 to November 2. It is the only festival here that treats AI music as its own submission format rather than a category of film: film entries run 90 seconds to 15 minutes, while AI music entries run 60 seconds to 5 minutes and must be scored to the official visual asset the festival supplies. It awards Best AI Film Music and Score alongside Best AI Vocal Track, and its CapCut AI Creative Award pays a year of CapCut Pro, 50,000 AI credits and a presentation slot in Tokyo. ElevenLabs sponsors a second award. Entry starts at $29 through Festhome, and the late deadline is September 30 at 12:00 JST.

WAIMF, the World AI Movie Festival in Marbella, also closes September 30 and screens at Puerto Banús on October 7. Best Music Clip sits among ten categories under a Grand Prix that pays cash plus a trophy. Fully AI-generated and hybrid work both qualify, there is no premiere requirement, and the running time floor is four minutes including credits.

AIMA London closes October 10 and runs at IET London on November 7 and 8. Its 2026 edition added Music alongside Art Image, Art Motion and Ads to a slate that already carried nine film categories. Further out, the Hollywood AI Short Film Awards close January 11, 2027 with Best Music Video inside a $2,750 cash pool and a Los Angeles reception on February 13. LAAIMPA in Beverly Hills is free, announces winners on the last day of every month, and takes music videos until December 20. The AI Slop Film Festival in Markham, Ontario closes December 16, carries a music video category, sets no runtime limit and requires you to describe how AI featured in your process. The MetaMorph AI Film Award in London closes May 15, 2027 and demands that AI played a meaningful role in at least 50% of the creative or production process, noting explicitly that basic automation such as spell-check does not count.

The largest music video prize has not opened yet

Chroma Awards ran its first season with $176,500 in prizes and a November 3 deadline, presented by ElevenLabs with fal, Freepik, Dreamina and CapCut, and it split submissions into Film, Music Videos and Games rather than folding music into film. Its site now says Season 2 launches mid-October and puts the running total across seasons at more than $2M in free trials and over $300K in cash, backed by Google, CapCut, Dreamina, Freepik, fal, Kling, a16z, Luma, Adobe and Hailuo. Our database lists Season 2 at over $175,000 in cash with a December 31 deadline. Nobody outside the organizers has the Season 2 category rules yet, so treat the October opening as the date to check rather than a spec to build toward.

Your Suno track may not be deliverable

This is the failure mode that has nothing to do with your edit. Warner Music Group settled with Suno on November 25, 2025 and struck a licensing deal in the same move. Under it, Suno replaces its existing models with licensed ones, and per Music Business Worldwide's reporting, free-tier songs become playable and shareable but not downloadable, paid tiers carry monthly download caps with paid overage, and audio downloads on any tier require a paid account. Warner CEO Robert Kyncl framed the terms as "committing to licensed models, reflecting the value of music on and off platform." Artists and songwriters get control over whether their names, likenesses, voices and compositions appear in new AI-generated music.

Udio went further. Universal Music Group settled with Udio and, as Billboard reported, the service pivoted into a walled garden where creations cannot leave the platform. A track generated on Udio's 2026 model cannot be exported into your timeline at all. Sony has settled with neither company and its fair-use claims continue, with a ruling expected in summer 2026.

Festivals put that clearance burden entirely on you. The AI International Music Video Festival requires work original to the artist, who is responsible for copyright compliance. GAIMVA makes you confirm you hold all rights, licenses, permissions and clearances before you submit. Curious Refuge sidesteps the problem for its own competitions by partnering with Epidemic Sound and requiring music from that library. Export your final audio file before you cut a single frame to it.

The biggest prizes on the calendar have no music video category

Forty-four of the 73 open contests will not award a music video at all, and they are the ones holding the money. The Higgsfield Global Film Festival closes September 14 with a $1,000,000 pool and a $500,000 grand prize, and its categories read short film, narrative and any genre. The AKOOL Creator Clash pays $300,000 and closes September 15 in a short-film category only. PixVerse's PixLight closes October 9 with a $300,000 pool split across a $100,000 grand prize, a $50,000 Gold Award and thirty smaller pilot and script awards, all of them for short films. The Runway AI Film Festival, free and paying $25,000 or more, closes September 30 as a short-film competition. Slamdance's DIG category closes October 6 with a $25,000 AGBO Fellowship from the Russo brothers and a Utopia distribution deal, and it takes short, feature, experimental and digital work rather than music videos.

Ranked by prize money, the music video calendar tops out at Chroma's division and the AI Song Contest's $1,000. Ranked by odds, it looks better than the film calendar does: Rome's Best AI Music Video, WAIMF's Best Music Clip and AIMA London's new Music category each draw from a submission pool a fraction the size of their own narrative-short pools, competing for the same laurel and the same screening slot.

Write one disclosure statement and reuse it

Rome wants 100 to 300 words. AI Film Festival Japan makes disclosure mandatory. The AI Slop Film Festival asks you to describe how AI featured in the creative process. The AI Song Contest wants tools and training data sources. GAIMVA wants the human contribution identified by name. One 300-word statement covers all of them if it answers four questions: which model and version generated the visuals, which generated or edited the audio, what you did by hand, and where the music is licensed from. Naming Veo 3 or Suno v5 reads as documentation. Writing "AI tools" reads as evasion, and juries at festivals that have run three editions have learned to tell the difference.

Runtime floors catch music videos, not films

Most music videos run three to four minutes, which puts them under half the ceilings and occasionally under the floors. WAIMF sets a minimum of four minutes including credits, so a 3:20 video is ineligible there and nowhere else on this list. AI Film Festival Japan splits the difference with a 90-second floor for film and a 60-second floor for music. Rome caps at 20 minutes, HASFA at 22. Vertical is safe at the two dedicated festivals: the AI International Music Video Festival accepts horizontal and vertical, and GAIMVA lists vertical and social-media music videos as a named category.

Four of the 29 are free

Entry cost is where this calendar gets expensive fast. Only the AI Song Contest, the Türkiye International AI Film Festival on November 1, LAAIMPA on December 20 and the Runway Hundred Film Fund on December 31 take music-eligible work for nothing. Everything else is tiered, and the tiers rise as deadlines approach: Rome from $9, AI Film Festival Japan from $29, MetaMorph from €18.86 to €38.54 depending on category and deadline.

If you have one finished AI music video and a month, the order that costs least is: enter the AI International Music Video Festival before September 30 because it is the only dedicated one currently open, add AI Film Festival Japan the same week if your piece is scored to their visual asset, check your runtime against WAIMF's four-minute floor before paying for it, then hold everything else until Chroma Awards Season 2 opens in mid-October and you can see whether its Music Video division still runs separately from Film.