Sorry for the self promotion. I was not anxious to post anything here - but in the end, decided to overcome my reluctance and share my enthusiasm.

JP Folk Awards page is here. And their Wikipedia entry describes the organization nicely.

They partner with some of the new music business folks to promote sales of indie artists (like me), and label artists - all of whom distribute their music through the new mechanisms of on-line sales and MP3 distribution (like iTunes, Napster, etc). Their primary partners in this venture are: Disc Makers, CD Baby, OurStage.com and Taxi. All of these are business that indie and small label artists are familiar with, even if they are not users.

For this awards project they considered 42,000 albums and 500,000 some songs that were published in 2009.

I hope that explains it. Agin - sorry for the self-promotion.