If you enter the search term ‘music awards’ in Google, you receive just short of fifty-two million results; there’s your Grammy, your BRITS, sharing the space alongside the Bulgarian Music Awards, and the Canadian Inuit Music Awards.
Wikipedia will serve you up with seventy-six pages of music awards, literally from A-Z, the Acedémie Charles Cros to the Zimbabwe Awards.
The awards season, until a few short years ago, was squeezed into the first couple of months of the year. Now, however, they are a never ending loop of the calendar, a year round bonanza, and frankly, with so many of them, if you don’t win something, somewhere, you really should consider giving up. Or simply organise your own awards ceremony.
In the week that I am writing this, London hosted one of the more well known prize-giving ceremonies for the great and the good (and the not so good). Having attended a few of these in my time, I can reveal that you generally sit at a table with a lot of people you don’t know, watching prizes being presented by people of whom you have never heard, to musicians whose music you’re fairly sure you don’t want to hear.
For the event I refer to, you would only have been required to stump up £300 for your seat* at the table (oh, plus VAT, of course) – why didn’t you go?
*By the way, with one thousand seats available, that’s not a bad earner, is it?
If you wanted to propose your act for one of the prize categories, then I will have to ask you to throw in another £75 per entry (plus VAT). You thought acts were judged on their merits? Only after you’ve handed over that 75 quid. If you’re not sure how to pitch, there are plenty of people who will do it for you.
So why do these prize parades exist? What is their purpose? To celebrate the very best in musicianship? To pay tribute to a breathtaking, innovative, ground-breaking piece of music?
Or are they an enormous marketing opportunity, to feed more opiate to the masses, as pop eats itself on a bed of rocket, drizzled with a lavender jus?
Every artist, without exception, who appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in 2009, saw “significant” increased sales, beginning during ‘VMA Weekend’ and continuing upwards through the following week. Muse, who had not appeared on TV in America before, saw their album go straight in to the Billboard chart at #3 (128,000 copies sold), and their ‘Uprising’ single saw a week-on-week growth in sales of 341%.
Following the BRITS in February 2010, the Head of Music at HMV reported that, in the following week, Robbie Williams’ album sales grew by 150%, Florence and the Machine by 140%, with the ‘lowest’ sales growth shown by Lily Allen with a not-to-be-sniffed-at 50%.
Yet, do not believe, for one moment, that this is all a cynical, under the table, aspect of the whole awards ‘business’ (and it is a business). Many of the websites associated in promoting these endless ceremonies are quite open about the sales opportunities provided by a nomination. The ‘Independent Music Awards’ even has a video on its testimonial page illuminating the promotion, and unit processing prospects, available to nominees and winners.
Whether winning such an award in contemporary times is simply a case of the emperor’s new clothes being nominated for best dressed autocrat, or whether taking a prize is a glittering coat of many colours to reward for an outstanding artistic achievement, is simply in the eye, and ear, of the beholder.
Of one thing, we can be sure: today’s award ceremonies will never match the brevity of the NME Awards of the 1960s. No speeches in 1964, just Roger Moore handing over gongs to the Disc Jockey of the Year, David Jacobs, bless him, and the best group award to... who else? Even they were given time only to do some gurning, and a give a wave or two.
Terence Dackombe April 2010
