By Lisa Chaly

Calling all Big Island musicians! Submissions for the Big Island Music Awards are being accepted now through January 31, 2012. Any solo artist or group may qualify if they are a resident of or were born on the Big Island and had a CD recorded, produced and distributed during the year of 2011. There is no fee to submit material and artists will retain all rights. Winners will be determined by an online voting system open to the public. The primary award will be a BIMA trophy engraved with the winner’s name and the category in which they won. There will also be an option for the winners to select a single track to be included in a compilation CD, to be completed by summer, 2012. To honor the winners, an awards banquet will be held on April 2 at the East Hawaii Cultural Center; tickets for that show are $35 per person, which includes delicious food, live entertainment, and special guest appearances. This event is a way to recognize outstanding singers, songwriters, and musicians of the Big Island and to help support the continuation of the arts in the community.

There are at least 32 different categories for contestants to enter, from contemporary to traditional, hip-hop to folk, film score to spoken word, and more. There is even a category for children’s music and books, as well as DVD’s. “I anticipate that not all of these categories will be filled with an entry and thus may be removed from the ballot,” says Dennis Soares, co-founder of the Big Island Music Awards. “If only one person submits in a given category, they will still be honored for their efforts to produce and enter their music or creative work into the contest. They will receive an award marked “NC” for Non-Competitive, but in every way they are still winners.”

There is no limit to how many CD’s can be submitted, as long as the CD was recorded, produced, and distributed anytime during 2011. This means that contestants can enter multiple times with a different CD, even in the same category. Soares adds, “If you are involved in a compilation or an anthology, at least one member must live or have been born on the Big Island. If the CD was recorded in a Big Island studio, but you do not live here, you can still submit,” explains Soares. “You can find all the criteria for submission on our website, www.bigislandmusicawards.com for further clarification. Also, it is imperative to submit all materials before the January 31 deadline. There will be no exceptions. If you are late registering and sending in your material, it will not qualify. Also, any submissions that do not meet the criteria will not be included on the ballot.”

As for the voting process, online voting will only be held February 15 – 29. Anyone, anywhere in the world, may vote. “This is a People’s Choice award; they are the judges,” states Soares. “Voting will be held on an independent website and monitored by a non-biased computer programmer. Nobody will have access to the internal workings of the website before, during, or after the voting period. There is only one vote in each category per e-mail address, but if you have multiple e-mail accounts, then you can vote more than once.” One acceptable way to get more votes is to host a ‘voting party’ or share promotional materials with friends, family, and social networks. However, paying for votes or tampering with the system is intolerable. Soares adds, “The voting system will be monitored very closely and any abnormalities will be noted. If everyone is pono, we will have a good time.”

Keeping in tune with a good time, once the winners have been selected and notified, they will be honored at the awards banquet on April 2 at the East Hawaii Cultural Center in downtown Hilo. This BIMA event will definitely be the first of many as musicians from around the Big Island discover the opportunity to be recognized for their work in the area of recorded material. Be sure to tell anyone who may be interested in submitting their work to visit www.bigislandmusicawards.com for more information. Remember, the deadline for submissions is January 31, so time is of the essence.