28th Annual Review Music Awards UPDATE

With the snow flying, temperatures dropping, and the new year underway, the first three weeks of nominating for our 28th Annual Review Music Awards is definitely heating up, with several new artists and established faces popping up in numerous divisions of balloting.

Seeing as we still have a few weeks to go with the nomination stage before shifting into final voting, I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the progression of this year’s ceremony, as well as address a few areas of concern that have been expressed.

First on the agenda, we have secured a date & location for this year’s ceremony. The 28th Review Music Awards celebration will be taking place on Sunday, April 27th from 5:00 – 10:00 PM and will again be staged at the spacious facilities of our gracious host, Lumber Barons in the Genevieve Ballroom, which is located at 804 E. Midland Street in Bay City.  Following last year’s successful streamlined format, the Awards After Party will run from 10:00 PM – Midnight, only will also be staged in the Genevieve Ballroom instead of ‘The Stables Martini Bar’ this year, to avoid the hassles of relocating downstairs.

We also have a new Board Member to welcome into the ranks, as Delta Broadcasting’s Trish Lewis  steps up to the plate to vacate the position left by Timothy Boychuck, who is taking a hiatus this year.  Trish brings a wealth of experience to the table and is solidly plugged into the local music scene, so is a very welcome addition. She joins fellow RMA Board members Bo White, Mike Brush, and Matt deHeus to offer their assistance at improving this ambitious annual celebration of the creative forces that give sustenance to our local music scene.

Additionally, we will be honoring two special artists into the GLBA Music Hall of Fame and continuing with a Critic’s Choice and Popular Choice segment to the Awards presentations.

Finally, we have received several emails and concerns from fans & readers complaining they have been unable to add names to the nomination list when they go to the Awards portion of our website at www.review-mag.comto vote.

In a majority of cases, this situation occurs because people are not logged in to vote. You must be registered and logged into the site in order to add nominees to the list. Another problem we have heard is with registration, as some people claim to not get a confirmation email. We have tested this and receive confirmations back from servers such as yahoo, gmail, and AOL accounts just fine. However, if you do not receive a confirmation email and try to log in, a form is automatically sent to us notifying us of your registration problems.  We respond to all of these as soon as we receive them. However, in a few instances we don’t get responses back from the individual, meaning that most likely the person has entered the wrong email in the registration process.  Unfortunately, we cannot prevent user error and can only attempt to make the process as user friendly as possible to minimize the amount of user errors.

Please understand that we are undertaking some heavy remodeling after this year’s awards to improve the voting process, as well as improve the overall user experience for all of the functions we have created on our online edition, including re-tailoring the site to be more smart phone/tablet friendly.

We welcome any suggestions, as we are exploring our different options of upgrading and expanding our digital presence.

Meanwhile, we encourage you to nominate your favorite artists in this first round of balloting (see details on page 15) and will have more to report in future editions of The Review.