The Boston Music Awards rang in its 23rd year with a six-hour party in the Liberty Hotel on Sunday. For the first time the event expanded its nominating committee to include more media outlets and added a handful of nomination categories.
"We opened up nominating committee to include writers from nontraditional media that haven’t been included in the past and created a couple of newer awards that recognize the changing landscape of the music industry," said Jake Brennan, a producer of the Boston Music Awards, who has been working with the Boston Music Awards team since 2008. Those new categories included music blogs, DJ residencies, and additional musical genres. "When you add new nominees, you get new individual communities getting excited about [the awards]," he added.
The 1,400 guests in attendance—local music industry insiders, musicians, and their fans—up from about 1,000 last year, packed the Liberty's lobby for a preparty cocktail reception where the Jazz Tellers Trio performed. At the hotel's entrance, a Boston Music Awards-branded step-and-repeat served as a backdrop for photos and interviews, and also featured branding for one of the night's nonprofit beneficiaries, Ernie Boch Jr.'s Music Drives Us Foundation, which provides funding for music education programs.
Live performances from about 20 nominees took place between 7 and 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. in three rooms on two levels of the five-floor rotunda, bookending the 9 p.m. award presentation. Guests moved from room to room to hear nominees including Girlfriends, Dom, the Varsity Girls, all five Best DJ Artist nominees, and Mystery Roar.
The event's producers hoped this simultaneous performance schedule would create a more irreverent experience for future awards. "We figured we'd open it up to the larger community and make it a party," said Brennan. Expanding the nomination categories to include nontraditional nominees, including Best Music Blog and Best Live Ongoing Residency, for example, can account for the expansion in the number of guests who bought tickets to support nominees or see performers who had not been included at previous Boston Music Awards.
That goal of making the the awards more genuinely reflective of Boston's music scene was also taken to the creative branding of the awards, with a new logo featuring a graphic of Paul Revere riding his horse with a boom box. "I think it’s more reflective of what Boston is," said Brennan. "Myself and the other people on the team really thought that the Boston music scene is about independence, hence the Paul Revere logo."
This year marked the second time the local music awards took over the Liberty, a shift from previous years, where a traditional award ceremony was held at the Orpheum Theatre. Big-name winners in attendance included Amanda Palmer, who took the Artist of the Year award, and Peter Wolf, who earned Album of the Year for Midnight Souvenirs.
