1.Who is behind the British Blues Awards?

The awards are being run by a group of 6 people who love Blues music in all its forms – some of them are professionally involved in the UK Blues music scene, others are very enthusiastic fans with a long history of participation at key Blues music events around the country. The group are all members of the Nottingham Blues Society.

2.Why are the British Blues Awards being done?

The awards team decided to run the awards because there was nothing already in place to reward Blues musicians in Britain for their blood, sweat and tears in keeping Blues music alive. Established music awards like the Grammys, the MOBOs, etc., in our opinion, pay scant regard to Blues music.

3.Why British?

Why not? National awards schemes for the performing arts in all its forms are commonplace. We're a British team of people and we want to recognise and reward British musicians that are working very hard to keep the Blues alive and are doing it in an excellent way. That said, we do have an overseas category in the awards – this is not dissimilar to awards such as the BAFTAs etc., where you will often see several awards for the “Best British ...” and other awards for the “Best International ...”.

4.Is the nomination and voting process representative of Britain?

After the nominations have been scrutinised we have had over 1600 nominations by visitors on the website from 769 unique towns and cities. 1374 musicians / bands were nominated – a very wide selection of artists by any measure.

To date we have had over 5700 votes cast on the website by visitors from 1018 unique towns and cities We are delighted with this clear show of support for the nominated artists.

In all, the British Blues Awards website has had over 12000 visitors since January 2010, 9000 of them unique visitors (or put another way 3000 came more than once to the site). These visitors have come from 77 different countries and almost 9000 of the 12000 were visitors from Britain.

Visitors have found the site from 415 different sources – links from other websites, links from emails, search engines like Google, as well as links from social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. Using tools from Google and Yahoo we can see that the British Blues Awards website is linked by at least 800 other websites and perhaps as many as 1000.

The British Blues Awards are supported on the website with reciprocal links on their websites by 8 Blues radio stations, 18 Blues related websites and forums, some record labels and festivals – 30 supporters in total.

5.How are the awards being funded?

Through sponsorship, we have 14 sponsors and their kind donations will cover the costs of trophies and associated publicity material. We are firmly budgeting to cover the costs within the amount of money donated and after all expenses have been met then any surplus will be donated as agreed by the awards team, almost certainly to the Nottingham Blues Society given the association of the team with NBSoc.

6.How are the awards being publicised?

Predominantly with the help of our supporters via their radio stations and websites. The nominations were shared around our supporting radio stations so that they could announce them at around the same time. The response from nominated artists has been consistent – they are delighted to have been nominated and they're making sure that their fan base know that they have been nominated.

Clearly, the awards team have been publicising the awards using every means at our disposal because we want as many people as possible to know about the awards so that they can vote and express their support for and love of Blues music in Britain.

7.Have other Blues related organisations been involved in the awards?

Yes, our supporters – radio stations, websites, record companies and festivals have. Our running of these awards has been openly known by thousands of people in the last 6 months or so (as can clearly by seen by the website statistics already mentioned). We have turned no-one away that has expressed an interest in helping us make these awards a great success.

8.Why are the awards being presented at Newark Blues Festival?

The awards team, all being Nottinghamshire based, approached the organising committee of the Newark Blues Festival to ask them if they would allow us to present the awards at their event and they were happy to agree. Our aim is to recognise the link between the awards team, the society they are members of and a festival held in the county of Nottinghamshire.

A secondary benefit is that Nottinghamshire is centrally located in the country and we anticipate that the attendance will represent Blues fans from all corners of the British Isles.

9.How can British Blues fans be assured that the nomination and voting process has been run properly?

The awards team will be getting an independent auditor to scrutinise the results of both the nomination and the voting stages to ensure that the result are a fair and proper representation of the nominations made and the votes cast. The precise numbers of nominations and votes per artist will however remain confidential at all times. Just the auditors assurance statement will be published.

10.What about lobbying for votes by artists?

The awards team are comfortable that this is happening – we could have had an expert panel to determine the awards, but most often when you watch awards shows on TV it is the awards voted for by the public that are most valued by the artists. We wanted the same thing for the British Blues Awards – our expectation is that many winners will be those artists who are enthusiastic about the British Blues music scene, who are pleased to have been nominated and who's fan base are sufficiently motivated to actually cast a vote for their favourites. Equally, we expect that some winners will be more established artists who simply have a much larger fan base. This is the real world and our hope and expectation is that the results will reflect that.

11.What do the British Blues Awards team plan next?

We plan to run the awards again in 2011 and beyond. We hope that we will continue to enjoy the support that we have had in 2010 and we will welcome new support with equally open arms.