…Speech Dabelle.

Wish I’d had the common sense to put a few quid on this, the citizensound favourite  for this year’s Mercury Music Prize. And YES once again we got it right!

Former Mercury Award winner and fellow citizen Paul Martin, who won it with Roni Size Reprazent in ‘97 (famously beating Radiohead’s OK Computer) thought she might win, especially as he’d put on one of her first gigs at the David Simon/Wire event at Book Slam back in May, which he also DJed at. And once he played his fellow citizens her debut single we all feel in love with both Speech and her music.

Fantastic that someone so young, fresh and talented should win. Proves that the Mercury’s are one of the few music awards that genuinely pick the winner based on artistic merit, not the buzz on Hype Machine…

I'm sure some of you would have seen the Nationwide Mercury Music Awards on BBC4 the other night. The awards were founded back in 1992 by then Virgin Records MD, Jon Webster, as a way to champion the best in British music. The awards still seem to generate plenty of column inches in the press, even if the TV coverage is relegated to the BBC's fourth channel. This started to make me think. As award ceremonies seem to be ten-a-penny these days, who really benefits from them? The biggest beneficiaries of the Mercury's are surely the artists, as even the most obscure of acts experience an increase in sales from being nominated. This year, Basquiat Strings sold 6,000 extra copies of their album, an improvement on the 270 copies they had sold prior to their nomination. Meanwhile, music fans benefit from gaining exposure to a bunch of artists that may not have heard of before; 2007 nominees Bat For Lashes, Fionn Regan or Maps were hardly household names, although hopefully they've gained some broader recognition among music fans. What has really been puzzling me is what the awards sponsors, the Nationwide Building Society, get out of it? The brand's website claims "As a major sponsor of sport in the UK, it was a natural step for us to get involved with the nation’s other major passion – music. And like our sponsorship of football, our sponsorship of the Nationwide Mercury Music Prize is a form of advertising, aimed at maintaining our strong and positive brand image." A laudable aim, but are the Mercury's really the place for the brand to build their credibility within the music space? It seems that they have tried to apply the same rules to sponsoring music as it does with sport, without acknowledging that they are very different beasts. It somehow doesn't seem inappropriate for a building society to sponsor the national football team, but I'm not sure what the fans of Klaxons, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand or Anthony and the Johnsons make of the brands 'involvement' in the music space. It feels like the Nationwide are trying to buy 'cool'. Where in music space you really need to earn it.

Pete Jenner, renowned manager of artists including Pink Floyd, T Rex, The Clash and still Billy Bragg kindly joined citizensound at the Venice Festival of Media. With a packed room of marketers, media agencies and media owners, he didn't disappoint. More on that later. He could only join us in Venice for the day, as he had to head back to London for the annual Awards bash for the Music Managers Forum. To his surprise, he was awarded with the special International manager award. Congratulations to Pete.