Everybody wants to pop in to the £20 Music Prize

Brian Boydon music

On the evening of Tuesday, September 4th, many of the UK and Irish music media will reluctantly attend the Mercury Music Prize at some posh London hotel. I say reluctantly because there is a rival music awards ceremony on the same night that they would far rather be at. In fact, if you were to ask the nominated acts for this year's Mercury which prize ceremony they would prefer to be at the answer would most probably "the other music prize on tonight".

For many music fans also, the other music prize has far more relevance to what they actually listen to. So why does no one know about this other prize? Why isn't it covered in the media?

The only music prize to be seen at on the evening of September 4th is the £20 Music Prize, which is held annually in a pub. The award is so named because the winner receives £20 (in cash) and the organisers feel that as a sum of money to reward great music, it is no more or less arbitrary than the £20,000 the Mercury winner gets.

The people behind the £20 Music Prize are the good folk from the Popjustice website (www.popjustice.com). The site is run almost single-handedly by the recovering indie music journalist Peter Robinson, who is on a mission to convince the world that it is wrong to cast aside pop music when one hits puberty.

Somewhat alarmed at what he would term the "indie snobbery" of the Mercury judging panel, and quite personally distressed that no full-on pop album has ever been nominated, Robinson set up the £20 Music Prize.

He announces his shortlist at exactly the same time the Mercury announce theirs - and it's the same with the announcement of the winner. Even the web page alerting people to the £20 Music Prize shortlist is modelled on the Mercury web page at www.nationwidemercurys.com.

Given that great pop is usually to be found in a single and rarely stretches to cover an entire album, Robinson's prize is for the best single of this year. The shortlist is drawn up in a purely democratic fashion by Popjustice readers.

This year's shortlist includes choice cuts by Calvin Harris (Acceptable in the 80s), Róisín Murphy's (her from Moloko) Overpowered and Mark Ronson's version of Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before. This year, in a truly remarkable turn of events, Popjustice and the Mercury have included the same act on their lists - something which really isn't supposed to happen. This unique honour goes to Ms Amy Winehouse.

Since the award's inception in 2003, the overall prize has gone to Girls Aloud every year except for 2004 when Rachel Stevens sneaked her way to the winning post with her Some Girls single. Girls Aloud are nominated again this year (for Something Kinda Oooh).

It's by no means a certainty that the pop lovelies will carry off the overall prize this year. There are plenty of mutterings about just how good the Mark Ronson song is.

There could, though, be ideological issues on the night. It has been pointed out that while Ronson's effort is perfect pop, the song itself is a cover version and the actual writers of the song belong to a prototypical indie band who, had the prize been around when they were going, would be a classic Mercury band.

This Ronson vs Girls Aloud controversy will run and run, and I, for one, am not ruling out tears (and possibly even a brawl) on the night itself.

Beyond all this, though, there is a very serious point to be made. The Popjustice web page gets in the region of one million page impressions per month. That figure alone is more than the combined sales for all 12 of this year's Mercury nominees. Finger? Pulse?