Madison Area Music Awards nominations announced

The Madison Area Music Awards sent out its list of 2009 nominees Sunday. As always, it's great that these folks make the effort year after year to both recognize local music and raise money to help kids get access to musical instruments and education. Keep on doing that, MAMAs. It's always fantastic when someone makes that kind of contribution to a community. But please, please change this process. Consider the how the awards reflect on Madison music, and who they engage.

Look, MAMAs: If you want to reflect the diversity of Madison music, quit requiring bands to make donations in order to be considered for awards, and quit requiring voters to make donations in order to vote. Yeah, it's just a minimum $5 donation to a very good cause, but A) a lot of these people could probably be talked into making a donation anyway, and B) staking this stuff on payment is just plain cheesy. (And hey, the broader the appeal, the bigger your pool of potential donors.)

In short, it would be great to see the MAMAs reach out a bit harder across Madison's many different little music communities and engage more people to gather nominations. Seek nomations with an open poll and request donations. Get creative with the categories, too--they're both too rigid and too complicated.

There should always be a variety of wildly different voices on local music, and local music accolades shouldn't be limited to the tastes of a young snob like me. In fact, I'm happy that the nominess include some of my recent favorites, like rap duo Stink Tank and weird electronic project The Cemetery Improvement Society. That said, I understand why Katjusa Cisar at 77 Square is surprised to see certain bands missing.

This baffles me still more, because I know that MAMAs founder Rick Tvedt is a nice guy, and that his publication Rick's Cafe covered a rich variety of local bands. In fact, the band lineups at the MAMAs award ceremony and the various benefit shows leading up to it generally reflect Madison's musical diversity fairly well, too.

Any way you cut it, the MAMAs organization is out there trying to do some good, but needs to get a lot more flexible and imaginative in its approach to local music. Until this improves, I will continue to be unimpressed whenever a band (or some manager or publicist they're wasting money on) sends me a press release that begins with "Madison Area Music Award-winning artist..."

But hey, if you're reading, I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this. I'm sure some of you have some interesting suggestions (or complaints, or retorts to me).