Recognizing lesser known artists

Earlier this week, another blogger posted something that sounded like the Lone Star Music awards had come up with the idea of rewarding lesser known artists.  While it's great to see their nominee list be free of the same names of the past, I did feel everyone needed to know the TMAs have been rewarding lesser known artists for almost a decade.  The following is my response.

Nothing could be more pleasing than to see some lesser known artists getting deserved recognition.  The Lone Star Music Awards are still, as wonderful as they are, a popularity contest.  As you mentioned, anyone with an email address can vote.  There is a place for this type of recognition, and Lone Star does a great job of this ‘people’s choice’ type of contest.  There is a lot to be said for popularity, and thus it should be considered when handing out awards to music makers. 

Let’s look at that logically in the context of what might happen.  The teenager who lives next door to me got a computer for Christmas, made himself a CD of some angry techno music and together with his 5,000 MySpace friends, collected some sort of award for getting the most clicks on a website.  Now he’s an award-winning Male Vocalist and he’s never performed a show in his life.  While this sort of thing couldn’t happen with the Lone Star awards, it can happen on a smaller scale when you realize that the winners of this popularity contest are going to be the artists who get the most fans to go through the process of voting for them.  

There is another type of recognition out there that is highly respected, but places less importance on name recognition and popularity.  These are the Texas Music Awards, sanctioned by the Academy of Texas Music, Inc., and now in their ninth season.  Each nominee is selected based on the music recorded during the qualifying period.  Nominees are determined using strict, publicly stated criteria by a panel of industry professionals, complimented by a public nomination process that lets the fans tell the nominating committee which artists, albums, and songs should get top consideration.  Once the nominees are named, often there will be names on the list which are unknown to the masses.  However, their recorded music will hold up easily, standing toe to toe with most of what is being produced by more popular acts. 

Former recipients include Wade Bowen, Michael Martin Murphey, Pauline Reese, Shake Russell, Jason Allen, and Hayes Carll, to name a few of the more popular acts.  As a matter of record, the TMAs awarded Hayes Carll with the Rising Star award in 2003 and the Singer/Songwriter award in 2006, long before he became the national name of today.  The TMAs are all about recognizing artists who have recorded excellent music, whether they are popular now or not.  Most of them will end up popular in the future, many on the strength of receiving the TMA. 

What sets the TMAs apart from any contest, competition, or popularity ploy is its unique voting process.  The public is allowed to vote.  Anyone with an email address can vote.  However, the collective public tally counts only 10% of the total voting process.  Next, members of the Academy of Texas Music, Inc. are allowed to vote.  There are performing members and voting members in this group and their collective voice counts 20% of the total voting process.  The bulk of the votes, 70%, are cast by a group known as the Honoree Board, and they are the best possible collection of folks to decide the outcome of the process because they are the very artists who have received the TMA awards in the past.  Each year, the current class of recipients is added to the Honoree Board and will vote in all future processes.  Who better to decide than those who know what it takes to receive the award? 

The TMAs, then, are no contest.  They are simply a recognition for excellence in the recording of Texas music.  The structure, except for the voting, is constructed very much like the Grammy process, in that artists must be a member of the Academy, much like they must be NARAS members to seek a Grammy.  They must be listed with MyTexasMusic.com, much like they must be listed with allmusic.com to seek the Grammy. 

The entire process is complicated, structured, run by a non-profit board of directors, and for the past few years has culminated in a red carpet affair hosted by such celebrities as Gary P. Nunn and B.J. Thomas.  The TMAs have stated that this year, due to the economy and other factors, the show will vary from its format of having everyone travel to one location, pay big ticket prices, and hope they can get available lodging.  Instead, the TMAs are going to offer a world-wide Internet broadcast that will reach more fans than ever before. 

The TMAs will soon name the nominees in fifteen award categories and at that point, it will still be important for the nominees to get their fans to vote, but the fans will have an appropriately sized voice.  The TMAs are so proud of the structure they’ve created and how it rewards the best music in the best state in the union, that they have coined the slogan, “It’s about the music.  It’s about time.”  For more info, see www.texasmusicawards.org