Everything here is inside your own control. None of it needs funding, permission, or anybody else to move first.
List every work you have ever released and write down who owns each one. Most people have never done this.
Affiliate with a performing rights society, and find out who collects your mechanicals. If the answer is “I do not know”, the answer is nobody.
Register your works with the MLC. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it is the mechanical half of every US stream.
Then fix your metadata: one spelling of your name everywhere, ISRCs on every version, IPI numbers for every writer.
Rewrite your streaming bio, your social bios and your email signature so they all say the same one sentence.
Film one show properly, with the crowd in shot, and cut sixty seconds of it.
Apply to Circulart, WOMEX, FIM GDL and Mundial Montréal.
Application fees are low and they vary: WOMEX has charged around €15–25, Mundial Montréal around CAD 45, Circulart has been free, and jazzahead! charges no application fee but requires delegate registration, which is the real cost. Check each one — but the point stands that applying is cheap.
Apply to all of them and let funding follow selection. That removes the selection-panel problem entirely.
CHECK THE DEADLINE BEFORE YOU START. These calls open and close months ahead of the event, and several close in the FEBRUARY OR MARCH before an autumn edition — so the year you are looking at may already be shut while the event itself is still in the future. If a call is closed, put the next one in your calendar instead of abandoning it. Each site publishes its own dates; nothing on this page is a substitute for checking them.
A signed split sheet before anyone leaves the room. No exceptions, including with friends. Especially with friends.
Every video below was checked against the channel that published it.
This is a plain-language map of how the systems work, so you know which questions to ask and which clauses to look at. It is not legal advice about your contract. Once there is real money or a real signature involved, that is a lawyer's job — and it is cheaper than the mistake.