>Raymond - a couple of years ago, on a BBC message board, somebody inadvertently posted SO's guidelines on how to vote. While they certainly didn't make any stipulations as to who or what people should vote for - style, material, record label, nationality or whatever - they did say on what grounds people should vote: specifically, for the folk act/individual/album/etc that had had the most impact, not necessarily the best or their favourite. This obviously creates a bias towards honouring acts that are already successful - or, to put it another way, acts that would already be familiar to R2 listeners. Are those guidelines still in use? If not, what do they ask you to vote for? Or is it more a matter of a tap on the shoulder in a dark corner of C# House... psst, Raymond... it's that time again, know what I mean... you know what to do...<

Pip –

Without giving too much away, ahem (shut that door, pull down that blind...), it's still the case that several categories use the formulation "artist/duo/group making the most impact". Is this an invitation to dispassionately assess an artist's "impact" on the British folk scene? If so, given that Bellowhead have allegedly shifted 60,000 units of Hedonism, there can be no contest for Best Group. But in practice, I suspect, lots of other considerations probably come into play, and not least of these are a jurist's own tastes. If I loathed Bellowhead, they probably wouldn't get my vote. So "impact" , I'd guess, means "impact on me" as well as "impact on the wider folk scene". That's always been my interpretation, at any rate.