Final answer:
There are 56 different possible arrangements of 3 musicians that could be selected for the prizes.
Step-by-step explanation:
There are 8 musicians competing for the first, second, and third places, and we want to know how many different possible arrangements of 3 musicians could be selected for these 3 prizes.
To calculate this, we can use the concept of combinations. The formula for calculating combinations is nCr = n! / (r! * (n-r)!), where n is the total number of objects and r is the number of objects we want to select.
In this case, we have 8 musicians and we want to select 3 of them for the prizes. So the number of different possible arrangements would be 8C3 = 8! / (3! * 5!) = 8 * 7 * 6 / (3 * 2 * 1) = 56.