29th Annual Review Music Awards - Updates & Announcements

As we move through these cold early weeks of the new year, one annual tradition that is decidedly heating things up is the nominating round for our 29^th Annual Review Music Awards Ceremony, which this year has introduced several technical improvements on our newly designed website designed to assure the most accurate and expeditious tabulation system; and has also witnessed several new nominees popping up in numerous divisions of the balloting.

Seeing as we still have until February 15^th before the nomination stage is completed and we shift into final voting, we have several exciting announcements to make regarding the way this year’s celebration is shaping up; and would also like to address a few areas of concern that have been expressed, as well as a few procedural requests that will make the nominating process easier for us to manage.

First on the agenda, we are very excited to announce that the 29^th Annual Review Music Awards celebration will be taking place on Sunday, April 12^th and will again be staged at Lumber Barons in Bay City, within the spacious facilities of The Genevieve Ballroom, which is located at 804 E. Midland St. 

Headlining this year’s performance segments will be a collection of artists that all have exciting new projects released and in circulation; and which we feel are representative of the high caliber of talent that our area has to offer.

Guest performers will include Donny Brown, former co-founder of The Verve Pipe, who will showcase his new original material and perform fresh translations of many Verve Pipe classics. This is Donny’s second appearance in our area following his successful November debut at The Red Room.  Other confirmed performances will include Sins in Stereo, Brody & the Busch Rd. Trio, The Distorted Waltz, Avenue 5, and The Blue Sage Ramblers, an exciting new Americana assemblage consisting of Bob Hausler, Jim Spaulding, Tom Dolson and John Nelson. Additionally, we will be featuring the newly formed sound of The Robertson Brothers Band, which is a new all-original band consisting of Mike & Scott Robertson and Rosco Selley from Maybe August, keyboardist Mike Thomas, and Mike McHenry on percussion. We are still awaiting confirmation on the performing band for our After Party, which will be announced at a later date.

Finally, as we proceed through the nomination round, a few tips & suggestions to make your nominating & voting experience easier.  First, you do not need to place nominations in each of the categories – only vote in those categories that you are knowledgeable about, as we review the list daily to make sure that spelling is accurate and that no nominee appears in a division that he or she does not belong.

Secondly, if you experience any problems or difficulties nominating, please let us know.  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. 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.

Meanwhile, we encourage you to nominate your favorite artists in this first round of balloting and will have more to report in future editions of The Review.