The Build Has Started
ContestDay is in active development. Here's what's coming to Spring Festival — and beyond.
We're building something brass banding has never had before — and we're building it now.
ContestDay goes live on 2 May 2026 at Spring Festival, covering the Grand Shield, Senior Cup, and Senior Trophy. That's the starting gun. By the time the draw is published on contest morning, every competing band's followers will receive a push notification. Results will be entered as they're announced from the stage. And if you fancy playing adjudicator yourself, you'll be able to score every band in real time through Be The Adjudicator — seeing how your judgment stacks up against the crowd and, ultimately, the official result.
But Spring Festival is the proof of concept, not the ceiling. Here's a clear-eyed look at where ContestDay is heading.
What's live at Spring Festival
The core platform launches with the features that matter most on the day:
- Draw publication — live the moment it's confirmed, notified to every follower
- Live results — entered from the hall as the announcements are made
- Be The Adjudicator — real-time scoring with crowd comparison
- Band and people profiles — contest histories, conductor records, test piece data
- PieceQuirk — the offstage cornet in Star-Crossed Lovers has fans. We're tracking the reaction in real time.
- Hot Take — live audience sentiment, timestamped to the performance
- Ask It Anything — a conversational assistant drawing on the full dataset. "Who has conducted the most Championship bands at this contest?" That kind of thing.
ContestDay is free to download and free to start. An Audition account gives you full access to the data and community features. A Principal subscription unlocks scoring, sentiment, and the deeper intelligence layer — priced at £2.49 for Spring Festival weekend, or £9.99 for the year.
The summer and beyond
Spring Festival is the soft launch. The British Open in September is the full launch — the contest where ContestDay will be most visible and most complete. Between the two, we're onboarding organisers and building the Grade 5 enhanced tier: branding portals, trade stand listings, hotel recommendations, and audience statistics that no organiser has ever had access to before.
Phase 2 brings the intelligence layer: smarter recommendations, Shadow Grading, a fully developed Hot Take system with crowd heatmaps. Phase 3 — targeting 1 January 2027 — is Fantasy League. Pick your band, your conductor, your dep player. Compete across the season. We're already in conversation with potential title sponsors.
For organisers reading this
Every contest on ContestDay starts free. A Grade 1 listing costs nothing and gets your contest, your draw, and your results in front of every ContestDay user. If you want more — your branding, your trade stands, your hotels, your audience data — the Grade 5 tier is built for you. And if you want the full experience — a dedicated white-label app, push notifications, warm-up scheduler, band check-in — that's the Diploma tier, and we'd love to talk.
The community is what makes brass banding. ContestDay is how we serve it.
— The ContestDay Team