2016 Motif Music Award Nominees

[This was written in 2016 and updated a couple of times over the years. Latest update: June, 2022]

People often ask – here’s how the nominations are arrived at:

We contact the booking agents at over 122 local venues that host live music. That’s every place we can find – but if you’re a live music venue that wasn’t contacted, please let us know. Many places are quick to respond by email – if they’re not, we also contact them on Facebook, call them, and finally will go to their locations to try to get their suggestions.

We also send the nominating ballots to all the local music radio stations, to the local music labels, to independent bookers and to all our music writers (there are 12 of them).

Each nomination counts once. We add them up, and the most votes in each category are nominated.

Here’s the tricky part – we get a number of nominations for the same band or performer in different categories or multiple categories (for example, Americana and alt). We have a last-minute meeting with our senior writers in each category (a group of six) to review categories and make sure we have the musicians in the right places. This group is all volunteer, proofing on average around 275 acts and typically putting in two meetings, or about 12 hours. We may even ask nominees which category they feel they belong in. If there are any ties, we break them at this point too.

Then everything is proofed – for spelling and also, again, for categories and geography, first by our proofing team, then by our editor. Volunteers for this stage are always very welcome. We work hard to get this right. We’re not saying we don’t make mistakes – there seem to be a couple every year – but we certainly do everything we can to keep them to a minimum.

That’s the nomination process – the last part is then up to you – everybody votes (restricted to one vote per person).