Even generosity can be competitive. Consider the increasingly pointed struggle by satellite radio providers Sirius and XM to prove who can lavish more love, and cash, on Canada's indie musicians.
The two radio services are going head to head this week, with gala presentations of the Polaris Music Prize (sponsored by Sirius) and the Verge Music Awards (XM) on successive nights in Toronto. Monday's Polaris winner will dance away with $20,000 for the best album of the year; Tuesday's two Verge winners will get $25,000 each for artist of the year and album of the year.
The two began squaring off last year, as XM launched the Verge awards in an apparent effort to counter the promotional value to its rival Sirius of the three-year-old Polaris. Sirius began broadcasting the Polaris gala in 2007; it took over as principal sponsor this year.
But wait - didn't XM and Sirius merge last year? Yes, they did, but only in the United States. Canadian businessman John I. Bitove controls a majority stake in XM Satellite Radio Canada, which remains in heated competition with Sirius in this country.
Polaris has enjoyed extensive media coverage since it was set up in 2006, which may have something to do with the fact that all the voters are music journalists and broadcasters. From that angle, the $50,000 XM put on the table looked like a quick way for its fan-choice Verge awards to get noticed.
"When Verge was announced last year, the amount was kind of an eye-opener," says Steve Jordan, executive director of the Polaris Prize. "But we've never taken the position that we're the only game in town, or the only one that matters."
Last year, the Verge awards were given out four days before the Polaris gala, with far less fanfare in the Canadian media. This year, XM positioned its Mod Club gala one day after Polaris, as if to suggest that the Polaris shindig at the Masonic Temple were just the opening act in a double-bill, indie-music sweepstakes. Metric and Hey Rosetta!, two of the three bands engaged to play the Verge gala, are Polaris nominees this year, and will perform at that gala also.
"I think the timing is definitely provocative," says Jordan. "But we don't see it as a threat. We don't have exclusive domain over these artists. Our position is that you can never give too much attention to some of the artists we have nominated."
Janet Gillespie, XM's vice-president of marketing, says, "we were not intending to be provocative. Our intent was to create a grassroots event that supports the indie scene."
Unlike the Polaris Prize, the Verge Awards are open to public voting. Short-list nominees are chosen by listeners to XM's The Verge indie-music channel, or by anyone who logs on to the Verge website, from a pool of artists and records that received at least 100 plays on the channel during the past year. Fan voting closed on Aug. 31.
In theory, the Polaris is open to albums of Canadian music in any genre, while the music on The Verge's playlist is more narrowly described by XM as "new and emerging indie and alternative sounds from Canada." In practice, however, seven of this year's 10 Polaris finalists appeared on the long list for the Verge Awards. Hey Rosetta!, another of this year's Polaris contenders, took one of the Verge awards last year.
The overlap would seem to undermine Polaris's claim to be inclusive of all kinds of new Canadian music. The final short lists of the rival prizes, however, have only two names in common, decreasing the chances of the same band being crowned on two successive nights.
In any case, Jordan says the prize money is only a part of what Polaris is about, and maybe not the major part. The main reason he founded the award was to focus attention on musicians who are often overlooked by commercial radio and industry-oriented jamborees such as the Juno Awards.
"What we do goes beyond handing a cheque out at the end of the night," Jordan says. "The main thrust is to market [our nominees']records so that people go out and buy them. We have a marketing campaign that starts in June."
This year's marketing budget is over $50,000, he says, including $10,000 spent on street posters. Polaris bought ads in entertainment weeklies and on music blogs, deposited free download cards of nominees' music at record stores, got Cineplex to run shorts promoting the artists and worked out a partnership deal with MuchMusic.
So far, XM's promotion seems limited to banners that can be downloaded from its website, on-air promotion on The Verge, and contests for free tickets to the gala. But its richer total purse can't help but shine a light on the prizes themselves, and on those who win them.
Will there be pressure on Polaris to raise the value of its prize? "There could be," says Jordan, "but we'd have to get more sponsorship money to pay for it." It might just come down to how generous, or how competitive, Sirius is feeling after this week's back-to-back prize events.
The 2009 Polaris Prize will be given out at Toronto's Masonic Temple on Monday. The 2009 Verge Music Awards will be presented at the Mod Club in Toronto on Tuesday.