VOTING: There has been some concern voiced by several of you (including Ben Lacy's thread) that this could end up being a simple popularity contest. There's nothing wrong with popularity contests, but that's not what we're after. So, we've taken several precautions against that.
1) I've tried my best to gear this towards a celebration of the music community, not as contest. Not so much "so and so is better than so and so", but "we'd like to take this year's opportunity to honor so and so".
2) The nominations process took place by announcing it here and elsewhere. It was open to the general public, but by far the biggest "demographic", as it were, who participated in voting were music professionals of one stripe or other. That is, musicians, music retailers, music stores, recording engineers, and others in the industry were the primary voters. NOT just the band with the most mobile fan-base.
3) The final voting is about to take place. Who will be voting? The nominees ONLY. Why? This is the last filter against the aforementioned "mobile fanbase" coming in and stealing the day.
Again, this also leaves ME (and others behind the scenes, like the wonderful Heather Parrish) out of the decision process, so there are no worries of biases or ignorance of the entire community seeping in.
Soooo....coming up: We announce the nominees THIS WEEK!!!
How many people voted? How many were voters from the roughly 295,803 people who live in Lexington? What credibility do you have in calling this 'the Lexington Music Awards'? How do you know the majority of the voters were musicians, music retailers, music stores, recording engineers and others in the industry if the voting was anonymous?
ReplyDeleteHi, Will. Thanx for your interest in the Lexington Music Awards.
ReplyDeleteOur count was roughly 1000 individual voters. I do not KNOW the majority were musicians, music retailers, music stores, recording engineers and others in the industry. I ASSUME they were due to how we got the word out (which I mention above).
That said (as we've discussed on the FB page), it is highly likely a few of the folks who were nominated did a good job mobilizing their fan base to vote for them. It is equally possible some folks "gamed" the system by voting from home, from work, from their phones. We tried to take precautions, but found when the security was toggled "high" on the software, it disallowed many from voting at all, or wouldn't let voters get past the first page (the ballot had 4 pages).
The system is imperfect. More so this year, as it is our first year. We've made a lot of mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. But we'll get it done this year and set the stage to do it better each year.
And only nominees vote in the finals. Another imperfect set-up, but one everyone seems happy with, as it becomes less a pure popularity contest and more a "jury of your peers". This two-tiered approach was not my idea, but I think its a very good one.
Credibility? Odd question. What would you like me to call it?
I'm sorry you didn't get nominated, Will. You have a lot of fans and you are among those on my list of people I plan to get out and see/hear when all this is done. I'm learning a lot about the music scene in Lexington. Learning about you and many others is a huge benefit to doing a show like this...and that is the point. A large part of the design of this show is to teach ALL of us about the incredible diversity of talent in Lexington.
I think this is the start of something that can be very good for the music scene here...and more. But only time will tell. It requires support from the music community. If we fail to get that, no amount of work will make this fly.