Thomas,

A few years ago Melody Guy won for Best Country album. Her entire budget for the entire album, including manufacturing was... $400.00 dollars. She was competing with well known established country acts. The same year Liz Pappademus won for Best Female Singer-Songwriter song against some of the greatest female singer-songwriters in the world with a song she literally recorded with a microphone in the bathroom of her dorm at college with just her singing with a keyboard piano part live to tape. So, can you compete? If you have a lot of talent and can make music that moves people, you sure can. No one said it was going to be easy. But our goal is to recognize fantastic music that moves the most people in our process. To put some sort of limit factor on the quality of work would be insulting to many writers and artists who haven't been paid or sold a CD but who have talent nonetheless. If you're making music in hopes of reaching a wider audience, then these are the folks you are really competing with. By the way, did you notice that none of those people you mentioned won? Indie artists beat them all. We have world famous people not even get nominations. We have complete unknowns winning awards. That's how it should be. It's a fair and wide open process that doesn't exclude anyone. Many people are left out of the major TV awards programs. We don't leave anyone out. If you want to enter, we don't care if you're a brand new songwriter or a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer (and we've had some of those folks enter believe it or not and they didn't win either!).

Brian