Established in 2002, ISC awards more than $150,000 in cash and prizes to amateur and professional songwriters around the world. Past ISC winners include Gotye, Bastille, The Band Perry, Passenger, Kasey Chambers, King Charles, Lindsey Stirling, Andrew Bird, NZ phenoms Gin Wigmore and Kimbra, and many more.

Winners were selected by a panel of judges which included, among others, Imagine Dragons, Martina McBride, Joshua Redman, Josh Turner, Keane, Garbage, Dido, Jon Secada, Darryl McDaniels (Run D.M.C.), James Cotton, Boney James, Jason Isbell, and Anoushka Shankar. Judges also included the top echelon of music industry executives, including Monte Lipman (Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, Republic Records), Dan McCarroll (President, Warner Bros. Records), Alison Donald (Co-President, Columbia Records UK) and many more.

Founder and Director Candace Avery states, "We are thrilled that an artist from Spain has won First Place in one of the competition\’s categories. This is the first time that this has happened, so now we are hoping that more artists from Spain will enter the competition and win. Jorge Grundman is an extraordinarily talented composer and performer, and he greatly deserves this accolade."

Jorge Grundman is an award-winning classical composer, musicologist, musician and professor who has helped to recover the music of Robert Kahn and Adalbert Gyrowetz among others through the non-profit music foundation created by him. Hailing from Madrid, Spain, Grundman considers himself a "writer of music" who tells stories through the musical narrative in the simplest, almost naïve way. He has made more than 20 recordings and has worked on projects in cinema and television, both in Spain and abroad. His works have been performed and broadcasted mainly in the USA, Canada, France, UK, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, and Spain. Among the performers of his pieces are prestigious soloists such as Brodsky Quartet, Ara Malikian, Daniel del Pino, Susana Cordón, Jirí Bárta, Albert Guinovart, Trío Arbós,  The Winchester Orchestra of San José, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional of Ecuador, Orquesta de Cámara de España or Non Profit Music Chamber Orchestra.

The overall 2013 Grand Prize is awarded to a Japanese artist: jazz trumpeter, composer, and arranger Shunzo Ohno for his song "Musashi." This is the first time in ISC\’s 13-year history that the Grand Prize has been awarded to either a songwriter in the Jazz category or an artist from Japan. One of the leading jazz trumpet players in his native Japan by the age of 19, Shunzo Ohno moved to New York City in 1974 to perform with jazz legend Art Blakey & The Messengers. Since then, he has performed and toured with many of the world\’s greatest jazz artists, including Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Gil Evans, Larry Coryell, Machito & His Afro-Cuban Orchestra, and many more. With numerous recordings under his own name as a leader, he has also appeared on over 30 more as a sideman and has collaborated on two Grammy winning recordings. Surviving both a serious car accident in which his teeth and lips were permanently damaged and a later bout of throat cancer which forced him to relearn his playing, he is a testament to determination and courage, even inspiring a biography and documentary in Japan about his life.