Recognition:

• The Music Cities Awards is a prestigious recognition that validates the work of organisations using music to improve their communities. Winning an award helps raise the profile of recipients and increases awareness of the positive impact their work creates.

• The award’s prestige comes from the expertise of the Jury, the track record of the hosting organisation, and the reputation of past winners.

• The Jury is a diverse group of experts from around the world, working at the forefront of various music cities-related fields. Past jury members include: Richard Florida, Urbanism Researcher/Writer (USA), Panos A. Panay, The Recording Academy (USA), Bonnie Richardson-Lake, Government of Anguilla (AIA), Isabella Pek, Kuala Lumpur City Hall (MYS), Angela Ndambuki, IPFI Sub-Saharan Africa (KEN), more.

• The hosting organisation, Music Cities Events, is the leading company in producing conferences on music cities topics.

• Past award winners include Warner Global DEI Institute (Global), City of Sao Paulo (BRA), Bogota 24 Hours Programme (COL), Auckland City of Music (NZL), Asociación Música Para Despertar (SPA), Bach by Bike (GER), The Musicon District (DEN), more.

Physical award:

• The Music Cities Award is produced and designed by Midton in the UK. The statue is made of sustainably sourced timber and screen print ink which does not contain ozone-depleting chemicals. For each award manufactured, a tree will be planted as part of the manufacturer’s collaboration with the “Trees for Life” and “One Tree Planted” programmes.

Music Cities Events speaker pipeline:

• Music Cities Events’ conferences focus on bringing people together to share their experiences and lessons from using music to create a positive impact in their communities. Winning a Music Cities Award will place your organisation at the forefront of the projects considered each year for our event programming.

• You should include a clear description of the organisation, the project’s functions, and its impact on the community.

• We recommend including evidence of your results as links to articles, videos, and other supporting documents.

• Since the Jury reviews many applications, we encourage submissions to be concise, clear, and supported by easily understandable evidence of your process and results.

The evaluation process is divided into two stages. In the first stage, each Jury member grades projects from 3 or 4 contest categories based on their areas of expertise, while considering any potential conflicts of interest with the applying projects. The grades are compiled to determine the nominees for each category. In the second stage, all Jury members grade the nominated projects to determine the final winners in each category. The criteria used to grade the applications focuses on the following:

• Does the project have a significant impact on the community?

• Is the project addressing a relevant need within the community?

• Does the project provide evidence of its results?

• Is the project innovative?

• When applicable, does the project offer a clear framework to sustain its impact in the future?

• Yes, you can submit multiple applications to the same category or to different ones. For example, if you are an organisation running different types of projects, you can submit an application for each project.

• Additionally, if you have a project that could fit into more than one category, you can submit it to multiple categories. In this case, we recommend adjusting each submission to highlight the specific topics of the corresponding category

• You can still win the award. All nominated projects that are unable to attend the Music Cities Awards Ceremony will be invited to send a recorded video message accepting the award, which will be displayed at the event if they win their category.