What would you change in your own award, and why?

I was part of the music awards and our plan was to have the top 20 music chosen from public votes following by the judges’ decision in the “best music”. The criteria to be chosen the ‘best music’ include creativity, how well it portrays their message, popularity, and universality. We realized that if the public chooses the top 20 songs they will mostly be pop-songs and although this satisfies the “popularity” criteria, there may be non-pop music songs that portray the message better, with more creativity and universality. Thus rather than having the public vote for the top 20 out of all music, it may be a better idea if the public chooses top 20 songs in each genre (pop music, classical, jazz, hip hop, etc.) and the best idea is to choose the “best” for each genre to have a more fair recognition and judgment. However, since we can only choose one, the fairest way to select the best music will be the judges from various backgrounds choosing the best song following the criteria. I personally think that there is no one correct and fair way of judging creativity, universality, how well it portrays and popularity so I think it can be judged in the following way:

  • Creativity and How well it portrays the message – based on the judges’ choice (again, it is impossible to fairly judge creativity and how well it portrays the message fairly so this would come from the judges’ intuition)
  • Universality – the demographics (how popular the music is across the world), cultural meanings (culturally appropriate?)
  • Popularity – We were thinking of the number of streams across various streaming platforms, including YouTube. However, we realized that the views from YouTube is largely for the visual rather than the music – eg. Kpop’s visually striking music videos. In this case, we would have to consider streams from other platforms and see whether or not YouTube views do not parallel the streams on other services or not (If the music video has 10 million views but 0.5million streams on other services, it would not be considered ‘popular’ comparing to a music video that has 6 million views with 2 million streams on other platforms)

What did you realize about others’ awards? Questions you might raise?

Choosing the “best” is very subjective and how we judge “high value” is different. Subjective aspects such as creativity, originality and how well it portrays messages cannot be judged fairly even if we have judges from different backgrounds. We all noticed that it is impossible to be unbiased and it can be controversial too because some art may portray a contentious opinion but at the same time art is considered the ‘freedom of expression” with no right or wrong. We would also have to consider the borderline of what kind of art can be appreciated by people.

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