Again to follow on from Howard's post above, most of which makes perfect sense, but to pick up on a couple of points, Smooth Operations reason for not making the judges public is to protect them from canvassing, however, in many other awards, including other music genres the judges are public knowledge, and presumably deal successfully with canvassing in other ways, so this does not seem to me to be a valid argument.

On the statement about folk Agents, a quick search of the AFO membership list reveals 22 AFO members listed as Agents, and this does not include Alan Bearman or Adastra, and a google search brings up many others, so there may be more than you think Howard.

Overall, anything that raises the profile of folk music must surely be something we all support, but the problem I see with the Folk Awards is that the public perception is that it is a select few judging the select few, and therefore not representative. The reality is that this is probably the case with most awards. The real shame of it is that the media, festival organisers etc, put so much store by awards, but I guess that is merely symptomatic of our celebrity obsessed culture.

One other thing I did note in the BBC's reply to Emma Hartley is the statement that none of the 'Voting panel' are performers themselves, I'm fairly confident that this is not a true statement, but I have absolutely no reason to question the judgement or integrity of anyone on that panel.

John