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The largest genres in our awards last year were Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Rap, Inst. Jazz, Childrens, Gospel, Classical and Blues. Each Genre had over 1000 albums entered which is more than the entire Grammy's had in total.

Our Album of the Year was a Spoken Word Artist. Our Song of the year was a Contemporary Rock Ballad. Our Songwriter of the Year was a Country Writer, our Group of the Year was a Taiwanese Rap group, our Vocal Group of the Year were Smooth Jazz and the best live performers at the show were doing New Ago improvisations on Trumpet and Electric Bass (it was AWESOME). The Techno winner is a regular poster here. All that to say JPF is by far the most diverse music org. in the entire world. BUT.... most of those folks never visit or post on message boards. They are busy gigging, writing and making a living making music. They just aren't interested in message boards which we all know can easily consume many hours every day.

No one supports or defends (and for that matter creates and/or nurtures) genres more than I do. We had nearly 100 in our awards this year with plenty of depth in all of them. Genres are NOT for the benefit of artists or writers. They are or the benefit of the consumer who wants what they want and has little patience to sift randomly through music finding what they came for. Sure, some folks like all or most genres, but most don't. And even those who do usually are in the mood for something specific and don't want to sort through the masses. If I want to here middle eastern compositions, I do NOT want to sort througth thousands of pop, rock, county, electronic, christian, childrens or any other type music before I find what I want. Genres are the most important customer service offering you can make for consumers. To say otherwise is to expose your lack of understanding of the business and the world.

That all, however, has little to do with genres here. If we had 100 times the traffic, (i.e. 1,000,000 or even 100,000 visitors per day) we might be able to support genre boards. But it has been a struggle to fill up 1 board with posts and more importantly quality feedback on the MP3 board. Each new board cuts that by 50%. So to populate each new board, we need double the number of people than we have now. To cut it into 12 pieces, we need at least 12 times more active posts than we have now. That would likely require 216,000 people just to equal that participation.

Then you add to it the problem that certain genres are much more open to songwriters who don't perform. Most are not. And due to that, theres little reason for folks to post in those genres in the same way and numbers as Country or Christian for example. So in truth, we'd need probably 400 to 800K users to really pull it off. We got app. 20 times more entries in the largest genres than the smallest. So to find those small ones, we'd need even larger numbers.

I've been doing this a long time. I was facilitating social networking long before the term was even being used. I'd LOVE to have all 97 genres from our last awards represented actively. I'd also LOVE to have chapters active in all countries and major North American Cities. It could be done with relentless hard work by passionate volunteers. If you can help find them and they follow through, I am more than willing to go for it.

Brian