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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Who judged the Indy music awards?
  • Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 11:33:14 -0400

Heh. For that matter, who "won"? It's Tuesday & the website doesn't seem to have the "winners" listed. Surely they knew the winners enough in advance that somebody could've taken the 10 minutes to put together a page with their names, and then set up a script to make it accessible after X p.m. on Saturday.

I hope they decide next year to do something [instead of handing out awards] that provides a little more opportunity to introduce their readers to artists they might not have heard about otherwise. Their regular weekly coverage does that to a certain extent, but with a finite amount of space and a weekly-news format, sometimes it's good to take a couple of steps back and paint a broader picture.

Or, if they have to hand out awards, perhaps they can learn from the Indy's own successful history of handing out their *other* two sets of awards, for community-service and the arts. In both cases, they solicit nominations from the community at large, and then have a panel of [publicly named] judges go through all the nominees & select X winners whom they feel have had an exceptionally good year in terms of their contributions to the community.

There's much less of a horse-race feel about it; there aren't lists of "losers"; and the public is involved from the very beginning, which might help to prevent any more embarrassing revelations about how much or little the judges know about certain facets of local music. The nominating process can itself be an educational process for the judges.

And since there really aren't any "rules" about how to run "music awards," the judges/editors could freely hand out as many or as few awards as they wanted, in as many invented categories as they needed to invent in order to best represent the good stuff that had happened in music locally that year.

Ross

Todd Morman wrote:

I'd just like to offer a small objection to the idea that this is the "first
year" the Indy's ever tried doing something like this. The Indy has a long
history of trying to present the local music scene to the local music scene
via special showcases and recognitions, some of which have gone very right,
some of which have gone terribly wrong. This clearly looks like one of the
latter. I mean, come on. Secrecy and non-transparency are not a very lefty,
independent way of doing things. The content is minimal, the package looks
rushed, and the whole setup - the nameless judges, the needless and
unexplained winnowing of nominees to an absurdly small number, the
popularity contest balloting - felt off-base. I can't imagine what it must
look like to someone who knows the scene's recent history, or to band
members left out in favor of yet another award for Superchunk.

Was there really anyone crying out for an annual music award here? (Aside
from the Indy ad department, I mean.) What was the point, except to set up
the Indy as a central taste arbiter in a way we've never needed one? It's
the kind of move you expect from a mainstream paper, not an alternative one.

It's just odd to see this kind of obvious mistake, is all. Like, we've sold
this as the music awards issue, now we have to come up with a music awards
process. Anyone have any ideas?

Well, at least getting Laird Dixon to make the award was nice.

todd Kirk must be really busy with non-music stuff over there morman

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