30th Annual Review Music Awards - UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

As we progress into the second month of the new year, one annual tradition rapidly engaging attention is the nominating round for our 30^th Annual Review Music Awards Ceremony, which is 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 18^th  before the nomination stage is completed and we shift into the final voting round, we have several exciting announcements to make regarding the way this year’s celebration is shaping up; and additionally would like to address a few areas of concern that have been expressed, as well as present 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 our 30^th  Annual Review Music Awards Celebration will be taking place on Wednesday, April 20^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.

While we are presently pulling together and finalizing the roster of featured live musical performances, our goal is to feature both newer artists to the regional music scene along with those that have imaginatively defined the tapestry of our musical landscape over the past three decades.   Confirmed guest artists thus far include the spirited and ‘all-original’ oriented music of up-and-coming rock combo Adaboy! (featured in our last edition); the country & roots influenced Americana of Jen Cass & The Lucky Nows; an exciting set showcasing regional jazz that will feature guest performances and be organized by Michael Brush & Brush Street, featuring Julie Mulady; and finally, an exciting set showcasing the impact of the regional Blues scene that we are pleased to announce will include the inimitable talents of Matt Besey & Larry McCray. Indeed, it gives me special pleasure to announce that Larry has agreed to appear, seeing as he made one of his first live performances at our very first Music Awards Ceremony, playing with Eastside Mike & the Boys of Joy back in 1987.  The remaining three performance segments will be announced in our next edition.

Finally, as we proceed through the nomination round, here are 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 issue concerns registration, as some people claim to not receive a confirmation email, which needs to be verified in order to assure that no ballot stuffing occurs

We have tested this and receive confirmations back from servers such as yahoo and gmail accounts just fine. However, if you do not receive a confirmation email and try to log in, a form is automatically generated 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.  But if you do experience any problems with registration, and do not receive a confirmation email; contact us and we can manually verify your account and notify you.

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 on the 30^th Annual RMA’s in future editions of The Review.