2016 Motif Music Award Nominees

[This was written in 2016 and updated a couple of times over the years. Latest update: Jan, 2025.]

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

We contact the booking agents at over 180 local venues that host live music, record companies, event planners, etc. That’s every place we can find – but if you’re a live music venue or booker 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. A lot of time goes into reaching out to them all.

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 (about a dozen).

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

Motif leadership does not select the nominees. If your band/act/venue was not nominated, it does not mean you are not great – it just means not enough venues or bookers put your name forth. It does not mean we don’t think you’re cool – we probably do. We provide a structure for this, to help the community celebrate the community. After that, it’s math.

Here’s the tricky part of the process – 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 and other community volunteers to review categories and make sure we have the musicians in the right places. This group is all volunteer, proofing on average around 300 acts and typically putting in two meetings, or about 12 hours. We often may even ask nominees which category they feel they belong in. If there are ties, we break them at this point too.

Then everything is re-proofed – for spelling and also, again, for categories and geography, first by our proofing team, then by our editor. We also make sure bands are still performing within the last year. At least once or twice. 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 are 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).