The Australian Music Prize (The AMP) is an annual award of $30,000 given to an Australian band or solo artist in recognition of the merit of an album released during the year of award. The award made by Australian Music Prize Ltd, a sole-purpose entity sponsored by a variety of music industry figures and record companies. The AMP was established in 2005.
Unlike the more mainstream ARIA music awards, The Amp aims to encourage Australian music of excellence - the prize's stated aim is to "financially reward and increase exposure for an Australian artist (or group of artists) who have produced and commercially released what specially appointed judges vote is the best contemporary music album in any one calendar year". In this sense, The AMP is broadly comparable to the UK's Mercury Music Prize.
2008's Prize Director Tracey Grimson says having a number one album counts for very little in the judging.
The thing about the Australian Music Prize is that it's genuinely about rewarding creative excellence. The albums are all listened to and they're all judged on creative merit. It doesn't matter if someone has been number one or never heard of before, they have an equal chance of making it through. —Tracey Grimson, 20-03-09The Prize typically launches at the start of October each year and accepts entries (must be new Australian artist albums commercially released in that year) in October and November. A Short List is announced the following February and then a winner at an event in Sydney in March.
Read more about Australian Music Prize: Past Winners and Short List Nominees
Famous quotes containing the words australian, music and/or prize:
“The Australian mind, I can state with authority, is easily boggled.”
—Charles Osborne (b. 1927)
“We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)