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.

mtvU Woodie Awards

I was starting to feel like such a buzz kill today as I wrote yet another post complaining about the voting process for mtvU’s College Radio Woodie Award.

As I mentioned in my piece for Radio Survivor, this contest has had a number of rounds; so it’s been easy for me to scrutinize various issues along the way.

There were nominees who showed up in the Top 25 after being absent from previous rounds, station call signs attached to the wrong college, and then today I noticed that the voting rules were recently changed, reducing the number of rounds of voting.

(A station testimonial on the Woodies Contest Page)

Here is why 90.5 WASU is the best college radio station:

1) The perfect music for college!
2) Always giving away great stuff like movie tickets, concert tickets, and anything else us poor college kids want.
3) Hilarious commercials that are created by the students.
4) Great radio voices that are always on air. LIVE!
5) They do so much and their studio is like a closet. A new one is being built right now but they are the best station I have ever heard any they have done so much with little resources. That is passion!
6) The station manager is Jon Wood. Obviously WASU is destined to win the woody award!

I’ve also poked holes in the annual Princeton Review list of “Best College Radio Stations,” and was tickled this year when I noticed that they accidentally left the #3 station (it turned out to be WSOU) off of their online list of the top 20 stations in their 2010 rankings.

(Another Comment on Woodie Awards page:)

WRCT Pittsburgh. Not on this, but amazing nonetheless. Freeform as ****. http://www.wrct.org

Basically I get irritated when stations proclaim things like “We’re the Best College Radio Station in the Country!” based off of these lists. Am I bitter? Perhaps. My own station was not nominated for either of these awards; and it’s not alone.

(Another Comment on Woodie Award Page…in a nod to Kanye West at the MTV Awards:)

Other stations nominated, I’m real happy for you and Imma let you finish….
BUT KSCR TRULY IS THE BEST COLLEGE RADIO STATION OF ALL TIME OF ALL TIME

So, although I’m really glad that college radio is being recognized; I hope people realize that there are excellent stations beyond those who win these contests.

(Another comment from the Woodies award page:)

appalachian state only have cows and hill billies listening to their station. And none even know how to operate a radio. In other words, they probably are listening to another station instead of listening to your hick music station.

Perhaps the main benefit of these awards is that they get people talking. If your favorite station is nominated, then you may feel pride and may work to help get them an award. And, if your station was left off the list, then you may get angry and start working to promote the heck out of your station so that more people know about it.

(Another comment from Woodie Contest Page:)

WRVU Nashville is a truly great radio station, but the truth is that the non-student run radio shows are what make it a unique station. Most of the college students just play lame trendy hipster crap.

As long as we’re talking and debating about radio; then at least it means that we still care and that it has a future.

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.