Happy 2010 musical Newyorkers!
Here at The Deli we start the new year with the much anticipated results of our Open Contest linked to our Year End Best of NYC 2009 Poll for emerging artists.
For the unaware, this Open Contest is the part of our Year End Poll which nominates artists through an open submission system - while the majority of the finalists are freely selected by a jury of NYC bloggers, promoters and scenemakers.
First of all I would like to say that it was truly difficult to choose the winners for this contest, and I can genuinely assure you that if we had an endless amount of time to devote to this we would have probably selected 50 to 100 bands instead of 15 or so. This is a testament to how amazing and strong the NYC music scene is right now.
The incredibly high number of submissions forced us to think about a system that would allow our jurors to listen to all the artists' music properly and to allow all musical genres to be present at the end of the process. To serve this purpose we decided to break down this mass of submissions, and split the entries according to the following genres (which we'll tackle in detail in the next few blog entries):
1. Alt Rock + Metal
2. Indie Rock + Electro Rock
3. Avant Indie + Noise Rock + Psych Rock
4. ndie Pop + Electronic + Other Genres
5. Rootsy Genres + Songwriters
It must be said that in this case the artists themselves assigned their music to each category during the submission process.
As of course all our NYC writers' objectivity is flawed by their familiarity with some of the bands involved, to keep the voting as objective as possible we decided to put our out of town editors in charge of the judging. We assigned 3 of them to judge each category - their names are listed next to the results. And to keep things fair, we rewarded a similar amount of artists from each category, rather than going for the highest scores overall.
I personally removed myself from this voting process and it was tough to see some of my favorite local artists not make it to the final phase of our Year End Poll. Nonetheless, I still think that our in house jurors did a great job and that this list of emerging MYC artists is nothing short than phenomenal.
Keep an eye on our poll on the right, as it will soon be populated with all the bands nominated for our bigger Year End Poll.
Paolo De Gregorio
www.thedelimagazine.com
