JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Hi Folks,

Wow.. 12 more genres left to finish before we have the final nominees. It's actually painful to have to make these final cuts. Because I've been fortunate enough to travel over the last 11 years and meet lots of artists around the US and Canada in particular, it's particularly difficult to see the work of people I know cut. It's just as hard to have to cut songs or albums that I have come to know and love myself. Even though we expanded the number of albums to be nominated from 8 to 10 in most genres it's clear we could go much higher and not lose quality. We have a process to break these final ties which I think is fair and impartial but in quite a few cases even that process isn't able to break ties so we're having some nominees spill out over our target of 10 albums and 20-24 songs per genre. Right now I am working on a category where I have met almost every remaining artist/writer and I realize that 6 of the 16 have to go still. Brutal.

We've learned a lot from the process as we do every year. We've had to re-invent the process each time and I am hoping we can use what we learned this year to make the next one in 2010 go a lot smoother. We'll have significantly less entries which will make things a bit easier, though I personally love having all this material entered because it gives us so much diversity and we get entries from such far away places. I've heard music I've never been exposed to before even with the masses we've filtered through in previous years. Just when you think you've heard it all something new blows you away. I can't wait to tell folks about some discoveries. In a few cases they won't get nominated but I can still at least mention them here in my blog so others can check them out. And the amazing truth is that we've still barely scratched the surface of the overall music that is being made in the world. My long term goal would be to have every piece of music commercially released (i.e. made available to the public) involved in our process so we can bring it forward to folks.

So I am plunging back into the final stretch of this process which I think will be finished by Tuesday. Then all that is left is to verify the songwriters as best we can without tipping off the nominees ahead of time (not always easy to do). I fear we may accidentally nominate something that simply wasn't original to the artist, but I hope folks will forgive a few mistakes. If we are correct 99.99% of the time we'll still make 56 mistakes. I don't think many folks out there are that perfect. But 56 mistakes are still painful right?

Here I go... bombs away!

Brian

I have to say I'm excited. Being part of the judging process was really fun, and I'm curious to see who won in the categories I got to know.

I've only been a member for a few months now so unfortunately,I was here too late to participate in the judging process.It sounds awesome,and I'm definitely looking forward to next time though!I feel like I've missed out on something amazing....