Greetings NEARians! 
Here’s a breakdown of our project “IIMG Artist Scholarship” for September 2022.
This is a part of our total monthly proposal for September 2022, linked here :
Under the artist scholarship programme, we scout for 2 talented emerging artists and award them a scholarship of $1000 ($500 each).
“Funding” is the biggest problem indie artists face while bringing their vision to life.
The IIMG Artist Scholarship will be used by artists for various activities like producing, marketing or making music videos based on their needs. This will be different for each artist. We, as a guild, would be awarding them the scholarship to recognise their talent and help them create.
Once that is done, we will personally work with them to mint those songs and music videos, as well as the rest of their discography as NEAR NFTs.
The scouting process takes place by advertising the scholarship and calling for entries. For our first round we received 45 responses. We can expect upto a 100 new responses for this round.
Throughout this process, we educate these artists about Web3 and the NEAR ecosystem, and help them mint their music NFTs on NEAR even if they’re not awarded the scholarship. Not only that, we create wallets for their buyers and help them with the entire process, onboarding them as collectors.
Here are some previous examples of these NFTs :
• Aanshika - Can You Tell?
• Suneet Rawat - Tu Hai Kahin
• Dev Sharma - Din Bhar
• Asmay Patil - Chahu Tujhe
All of the entries we receive are then filtered and sent to our jury of established Indian artists.
We currently have the following jury members :
Avanti Nagral ( https://www.instagram.com/avantinagral )
Komorebi ( https://www.instagram.com/komorebi.music )
Osho Jain ( https://www.instagram.com/oshojain_ )
Total budget for this activity : 1000 USD
Thank you @Paul for suggesting us to create separate topics for each project 