It’s hard to believe that the award season is already upon us. Before too long there will be the American Music Awards, Grammy Award activity and just before all of that we should have the announcements for our New Music Awards. This is the time that we get to honor the very best artists and bands that graced the charts over this past year. We will be looking at the top movers and shakers in the field of Top40, Country, AC and College radio. The year started out with a trickle of new music and that all soon changed to quite an avalanche of solid songs from new emerging artists as well as the established ones. Now we try to sort all of this through on nominations process.

In this issue you will find some of the artists that did well in 2012. Many of them are still moving up our charts and any of them can be considered. As much as we do our research there are other elements that can contribute to a nomination. Over the next few weeks we will also be talking to radio about how artists impacted radio in certain markets. If you think this gives an advantage to the majors, think again. Many of our reporting stations, program and music directors, actually favor the independent music artist. A good deal of these stations and programmers have been playing and reporting new artists all year long. You can now count on them as being in your corner and right when you need them the most.

As in year’s past we will not only be looking at artists and bands but will also be reviewing the very support system that helps to make records happen. We will honor many of those radio stations, music and program directors that actually play a part in helping to launch our artists “on the charts”. It also gives the NMW family a chance to pay a bit of tribute to radio promotion people and publicists alike. Many of these unsung heroes are a pivotal part on how records take off in the first place. Make no mistake about it, you have to make a great record, but without the support of a good promotion and publicity team behind you, little can happen and that’s pretty much a proven fact. It’s always been about a “team effort” and generally the act that has the best team behind them finds success.

New Music Weekly also provides the opportunity for artists and bands to help themselves in achieving a New Music Award. Once the nominations are listed and they will be posted on our website for the world to see, the fun really begins. You can then rally all of your fans and friends to vote. That has a major impact on the final outcome and with this being such a tight up and coming race, it may come down to a few final votes. Nominees will appear in a full page ad in our next few issues of the printed magazine and there will be plenty of press regarding this event as well. The artists and bands that are the most motivated can go to work soon and create their own campaign push.

In the next few weeks many of you will be receiving a copy of our Future hits volume #42 CD sampler. This is one of our major opportunities to service great new music to “all of radio”. All of the artists will also be serviced digitally through Airplay Access as well. In addition to great new music from new emerging artists, there will also be some new songs just in time for your holiday programming. We encourage all of our music and program directors to carefully review all of the songs from this Future Hits compilation. We have never had such an outpouring of response and had to choose from over 400 submissions this time out. The music is all pretty amazing and it’s on the way to you in just a few weeks.

Our New Music Awards, Future Hits, STS tracking and this printed magazine are just a few of the “tools of the trade” NMW offers to help artists and bands. In this issue you will also find some valuable information from station prep to invaluable chart information.