2011 mtvU Woodies Come to SXSW

Last fall I kept my eyes peeled for the chance to nominate my favorite college radio stations for the annual mtvU College Radio Woodie Award, but the opportunity never came up. I assumed that mtvU had disbanded the Woodies awards event, especially considering all of the complaints I’d had about the voting process over the years.

Well, it turns out they’ve just moved the Woodies from the Fall to the Spring. And, again, I missed the nomination period! Distracted by the shutdown at my local college radio station KUSF, the Woodie news slipped past me.

According to a press release on the MTV website,

“Once again, mtvU is also honoring 50 pioneering college radio stations committed to bringing students the latest indie and emerging music.  Lauded for championing artists before they achieve mainstream success, these student-run radio stations represent the new music vanguard long since abandoned by traditional FM radio.  The top stations are chosen based off accolades from CMJ College Radio acknowledgements [sic], Princeton Review top list, online nominations through Rate My Professors and Twitter and independent questionnaires completed by a cross-section of record labels.”

Between February 1st and February 8th, 50 nominees were voted on and narrowed down to the top 25 vote-getting stations. On February 15th, the list was whittled down to 10 and the final round of voting is now open through March 1st. The winning college radio station will be announced on March 16 at the Woodie Awards ceremony, taking place in Austin, Texas at South by Southwest this year. The ceremony will also air live on MTV.

Even though I grumble about whether or not any of these college radio awards REALLY bring attention to the best and most interesting stations, I’m still glad to see the attention being paid to college radio.

Here are the 10 college radio stations still in the running for the 2011 College Radio Woodie:

WASU (Appalachian State University, Boone, NC)

KCPR (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA)

CJLO (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

WRGP (Florida International University, Miami, Florida)

WRAS (Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA)

WRHU (Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY)

WLOY (Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD)

WKPS (Pennsylvania State University – University Park, PA)

WVPH (Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ)

WERW (Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY)

WJPZ (Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY)

WHUS (University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT)

WPTS (University of Pittsburgh)

KUPS (University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA)

KXSC (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA)

WPNR (Utica College, Utica, NY)

WPSC (William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ)

To read about the voting process for the last College Radio Woodie Award (from 2009), take a look at my coverage on Spinning Indie. The 2009 College Radio Woodie went to KUPS and the 2008 College Radio Woodie (see nominees here) went to WICB.

KZSC Lobby at UC Santa Cruz

Today the Huffington Post takes a stab at naming the 9 Best College Radio Stations. They admit that the list may not be complete (how could 9 stations cover it all?) and acknowledge that they drew inspiration from the recent College Radio Awards during the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City last week.

Several of the stations on the Huffington Post list were winners at CMJ and others have been featured in college radio lists compiled by Princeton Review and mtvU (for their College Radio Woodie Award).

No offense to any of the stations named, but it’s important to keep in mind how all of these lists are determined. Princeton Review’s list is actually only an accounting of station popularity on campus according to students at universities polled by Princeton Review (they are asked how popular the campus radio station is).

mtvU’s college radio Woodie awards (which seem to have been discontinued after last year’s ceremony) were based on online nominations and voting. CMJ’s awards were voted on by attendees at the CMJ Music Marathon based on nominations made by stations and industry types who are CMJ subscribers; so the list is limited to that universe of stations with connections in the CMJ sphere. As I mentioned during the nomination process, I was still really happy to see some new stations up for the CMJ College Radio Awards this year, as in the past it seemed that there were many nominees from the same small group of stations.

I do like that the Huffington Post piece explains what sets each station apart (although some of their fact-checking is sketchy– I chuckled when I saw that they wrote that KZSC is funded by the FCC. Licensed would be more accurate.) and in that respect the list is a great jumping off point for college radio exploration.

Here are the 9 Best College Radio Stations according to the Huffington Post:

CJLO (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

WKDU (Drexel University, Philadelphia)

WICB (Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY)

Radio DePaul (DePaul University, Chicago, IL)

KZSC (University of California, Santa Cruz)

KEXP (University of Washington, Seattle, WA)

WGRE (De Pauw University, Greencastle, IN)

WERS (Emerson College, Boston, MA)

WCRX (Columbia College, Chicago, IL)

I recently covered even more interesting (and lengthier) list of college radio stations put together on Zoomout. A few from the Huffington Post list are included, but by featuring 82 college radio stations, the Zoomout list is able to give a broader representation of excellent freeform college radio stations from all over the United States and Canada.

What do you think of this particular list? Is it a good representation of what college radio has to offer or are there glaring omissions?

mtvU Woodie Awards

Whenever a list is produced of the BEST of anything there will be nay-sayers; whether the list comes from “experts” or is the result of popular vote. For that reason, I’m suspicious of every list that I’ve seen of the most popular/best college radio stations. Now with the latest contest underway, mtvU’s (MTV’s college-oriented network) award for best college radio station in their annual Woodie Awards, I have even more reason to cast a critical eye.

Currently one can vote from among the “top” 100 college radio stations in the U.S. on the mtvU Woodies page on RateMyProfessors.com. This is the second round of voting, as those 100 stations were chosen from a list of 300+ stations that was posted a few weeks ago. On September 15th, based on votes, the list will get whittled down to 50 stations. After that, votes will determine the top 25. Finally, there will be another 4 rounds to determine four regional winners (Northeast, West, South and Midwest). From those regional winners an overall winner will be chosen by popular vote.

I have several problems with mtvU’s specific process:

1) Timing of Nominations over Summer Break a Bad Idea

Voting for the top 100 stations was from August 18th to September 8th (the day after Labor Day). Although one could nominate stations not already on the list, chances are high that many college radio stations were on summer break when the voting process started and missed the opportunity to nominate or vote.

2) Factual Errors in Nominee List Casts Doubt on Results

During the nomination round I saw a ridiculously high number of factual errors on the list of nominated stations. When taking a look at the California stations alone, many of the listings had an incorrect school name attached to a radio station’s frequency and call letters. This makes me very dubious about a lot of things. The lack of attention to detail casts doubt on the entire voting process for me. It also means that we can’t know for sure if people were voting for the station that they meant to vote for if the call letters and school name were incorrectly matched.

3) The Math

I’m a little confused about how the 100 most popular stations get narrowed down to 4 regional finalists. Out of the 100 still in contention, 19 are from the Midwest, 25 are from the West, 27 are from the South and 29 are from the Northeast. So, at this point; each of the stations in the Midwest seems to have a higher chance of making it into the final round compared with stations from the Northeast. Just curious about why they didn’t choose 25 finalists from each region.

Additionally, it’s not clear how often one can vote for a specific station or if one can vote for multiple stations.

4) Unclear Criteria for What Constitutes a “College Radio” Station

I saw some comments on the mtvU website contesting some of the listed stations, with folks arguing that some on the list weren’t really student stations. I’m the first to admit that college radio stations are diverse, with not all stations on college campuses fitting the mainstream definition of college radio. There are public radio-affiliated stations with no student involvement, commercial stations run by students, stations that only reach the dorms, college stations with a high number of non-student DJs, and everything in between.

5) Some great stations were Never Nominated

This is probably the point that I most want to make. Many amazing student radio stations were not included in the initial list of 300 stations, so they never had a chance for this award. (Granted, one could tweet a nomination for your station, but from my experience that had to be done some time before September 4th).

That is one of the most important things to realize when the final winner is announced and when stations start promoting that they are among the “top 100 college radio stations in the country.” These contests never seem to include the entire universe of stations and it often takes a very committed radio station staff to make sure that their station is nominated. I’m convinced that it also is key that a station work hard to promote “getting out the vote” and the most successful stations in doing that probably win year after year.

None of this is meant to knock down winners of these competitions, as often there are great college radio stations on these “best of” lists. I just want to cast a bit of a critical eye on how stations get on these lists and remind people that many awesome stations are overlooked.