JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Hi Ian,

Actually that article was from the 2004 awards. By the time we got to the 2009 awards, they'd grown MUCH larger. 50 times larger in size than the Grammys for example. Last time around we had 560K songs entered and 42K albums.

As far as your suggestions:

-We already have a music awards. Our view is that Awards are different than Contests. Awards recognize merit only. Unlike "contests" we don't give out prizes in hopes of luring more entries. In fact, we intentionally don't want people to chasing prizes. Instead we want an unbiased volunteer based process to fairly recognize music that moves them. Contests have many competing agenda's, not the least of which is making profits and also pleasing their business partners and in many cases their "industry" contacts. Large televised awards programs face huge influence issues from the very people they are supposed to be judging and recognizing. If you want artist X, Y or Z to attend, you have to bribe them with huge "gift bags" which in my view are bribes. (i.e. if I give you this, you'll attend"). Others tell the winners before the show they are winning in exchange to get them to show up and/or perform. Contests are most interested in pumping up entry numbers to pump up the coffers to pay staff and the owners. In some ways they also bribe people, only in this case it's offering cash and prizes to get entry fees.

This doesn't make them dishonest, but it does influence everything they do in ways that, in my opinion, are not conduscive to simply choosing the music that most moves people. And of course there's also the corruption and dishonesty and outright scams which simply steal entry fees for pre determined winners, or who peddle winning slots in exchange for all sorts of things. I've seen so much corruption that is out in the open in the industry that I wanted to create something different. And even if there were no corruption at all in a perfect world, the models above still aren't appealing to me. Why should an artist have to pay for a chance to be recognized? That's like paying to be in a "who's who" type book just so you can buy 10 expensive copies of it to show your friends how important you are. It's hollow.

It is VERY expensive to do the awards. The cash expense eats 2 years of our sponsorship income AND more out of pocket and from our donations, t-shirt and hat sales etc. But the most costly portion is the app. 600,000 hours of time donated to screen the music. And there's the rub. We couldn't possibly charge enough to make this a non volunteer based process. And unlike an awards such as the Grammy's or others, we actually REQUIRE all judges to listen to the music they are judging, not just choose their favorites from a list of names. (Many folks aren't aware that they do not supply music for judges to listen to, but rather a list of names to simply vote on).

Our awards grew so large we took them on line because the manual labor (not listening but just opening packages, getting info manually into databases and literally mailing thousands of CD's around the world multiple times, burning new discs with compilations of songs etc...) cost a tremendous amount of money and time. It also took over our very large home year round to deal with it all. So moving it on line got us past those costs but an interface had to be built to my specifications (i.e. I designed the process, but they had to create the software) and it had to be donated to us to use. We spent much of the 17 months working on that round by round trying to stay ahead of the process of the judges who were working away month after month whittling down 100 genres of music in both full albums and separately songs. Sadly, when we finally had the interface built, it was taken away from us leaving us now having to again start over to do it all again.

Even if I had gotten 560K in income for all those songs (not to mention the albums) it wouldn't have begun to pay for all of that. Imagine paying over 10K people only 500 dollars each to do on average nearly 50+ hours of screening each? (And many folks did 100's of hours and the top screeners did more than the equivelent of a full time job). Instead of doing it for the passsion and love of the music, they'd do it to make a buck and most would just put time in to make more money. It would just be a big scam opportunity for exactly the wrong kind of people. In addition, imagine paying top notch programers salaries for 17 months to build, tweak, fix and finish a judging interface larger than any previously existing in world history? (This is a fact, the people that did it build the current audio players for Yahoo, AOL, CBS Radio and many others). It would have cost more than those entry fees alone. Basically one this became about money, and nothing was donated, it would probably have cost north of a million dollars to do, maybe 2 million.

And the VIP judges? Who says we didn't have many "VIP" judges? We did. But we weren't there to falsely trick suckers into thinking some famous person might discover them simply because we attached a rock star's name to a judging list. Those judges are not doing the heavy lifting. In some cases the "famous names" listen to a handful of songs in TOTAL. I spoke with one famous star who told me he listened to a single song and was asked if he liked it. He said it was okay and he wanted to hear more and was told, "well, that's the winner, it's already been picked, we appreciate you listening to it." Even when "stars" do some actual judging, it's only the end finalists. All those people who dreamed of being discovered never got near the star who in truth isn't going to "discover" them even if he loves them. Active industry people hear tons of songs and artists they love every year and they can't help any of them. No one can. And then there's the scams where a pet project by a famous "judge" wins (what a coincidence) as payment for their "participation." Using famous names in my opinion is at best misleading to all entrants who think that star is there from day 1 listening to all the entries and at worst a scam.

Thousands of other people are doing the real listening and none of them are famous, so why imply otherwise? And since when did "fame" mean someone was even a good judge of music? Many artists aren't that great at it frankly.

We use a mix of judges. Music Industry Professionals (Managers, Attorney's, Publicists, A&R, Producers, Publishers, Venue Booking People, Tour Managers, Online Music Libraries etc.), Artist and Songwriter Peers that ranged from entry level to Rock Hall of Fame members, and Music Fans with a passion for a particular genre of music who didn't care about famous names, but loved great music no matter who made it. And just to be clear, we had all levels of entrants as well from famous artists (including some of the very biggest named artists in the world) and those who have won every major music oriented award that exists, all the way down to people making their first recording. All of them were treated the same and though we had some famous name winners and nominees, we had far more who fell short. But it was fair all around. Only the music that MOVED people moved forward. And that was the only criteria. None of this silly list of things to measure something by. People listen to music and it either touches them or it doesn't. It might be formulaic and predictable or it may break every rule in music, (and some of it did) if it moved people in large enough %'s, it moved forward. I think our mix of judges and our voting instructions are the best in the industry. But there are plenty of other Awards and Contests out there to choose from if you prefer a different approach. I am just not that interested in them and why spend a big chunk of my life on something I am not passionate about?

The large numbers actually make it much harder for bias to affect a process as well. Because even if you have someone operating with evil intent (and you always find these people in all things) their one vote simply isn't enough to make a difference. It's not American Idol where people can vote 1000 times.

I personally felt there was a serious need for 1 awards process to exist that didn't charge the people they were trying to recognize, didn't care how commercial (or noncommercial for that matter) famous or non famous, connected or unknown, popular or unpopular the people were. Something that judged only on 1 universally true criteria: Does the music move you?

As for your process, there are a lot of contests that exist exactly like what you describe and some of them I consider honest and reputable. But there's no reason for me to simply become another one of those. Even if we could do it better, it would still not fill the void that the JPF awards fills.

Now, you are correct that JPF needs money to expand. I've taken it about as far as I can with less than a shoestring budget and all volunteer workers (what I wouldn't give for just 1 or 2 full time assistants.. I could probably triple or quadruple what we accomplish right now). But we'll need to find a way to raise money that allows the JPF awards to stick to its vision. And there are other areas of JPF that are just as important. The Chapters, by the way, are always a roller coaster. The biggest problems for them are my health (I was too sick this year to do any traveling which is critical for their health in new cities) and the awards which suck all the energy we have away from all projects other than the awards.

That's why I switched to every other year. So I could travel 6 months and work on the awards 6 months each year. That's a balance I can handle and that worked well for both the chapters and the awards.

Someday I'll find some full time volunteer help.. perhaps someone already wealthy who can afford to do it and who has the same passion I do.. it's a really fun job if you can accept the lack of pay, or we'll find additional long term community partner sponsors to join TAXI, CD Baby, Disc Makers, Hostbaby and our many part time sponsors who come and go each year. With my health in the toilet, I also have to think about what happens to JPF if I am unable to continue. I am always looking for the person or persons I am going to hand this off to. I have a shortlist, but all those folks have other things they are already doing. I'd want someone who would keep things going with the same guiding principles I have. It would be great if that person came out of our volunteer team. I am always watching.

Brian