The ‘Best Of 2025’ award is in full swing, with only a few days remaining before the winners will be announced. As per usual, it’s getting some great media attention for the artists that were nominated, which we’re really excited about!
One thing we realised, based on feedback from the community, is that it was time to introduce some rules. The scale of the awards is now large enough that people find all sorts of creative ways to promote their nominations, and we weren’t giving a clear signal around what types of promotion are acceptable or not.
That made it difficult to take action if people were doing something that felt like it goes against the spirit of the awards, especially when it starts to transfer into the area of ‘vote buying’ (e.g. doing a giveaway to get people to vote for you).
The new rules are meant to help with this, and introduce a way to formally report something that looks off.
We like to focus on getting people to see amazing art, and not so much on rules and regulations, but hopefully the introduction of these rules makes the awards fairer for everyone.
Since we’ve only added these rules halfway into the current awards edition, we aren’t taking any steps to disqualify artists that didn’t follow these rules previously, but we will start enforcing them more strictly in future editions.
If you have any feedback on the awards and these rules, we’d love to hear from you. As always, all of this is a community effort, and we can’t do it alone!