The Boston Music Awards pony up for bottle service at Big Night Live on Wednesday, 20 December 2023.

The annual shindig featured live performances from Nay $peaks, Clark D, Divine Sweater, Neemz, Shallow Pools, Cape Crush, Maeko, and more.

There was a weird cyclotron ring light thing that’s hard to describe.

Big tip of the hat to the organizers behind the local awards event at Big Night Live.

There’s no right way to run an awards show because it's basically an impossible proposition.

You are supposed to interweave live acts from distant musical niches with roll call-style announcements of nominees and winners…

And that’s a show? A show that people are supposed to pay to see?

And yet it was a show. And people did pay to see it.

Credit the first half of that accomplishment to a strong local appetite for a rangy gamut of music. A lot of diversity in the music scene flows into the city of Boston (and beyond) each year. Maybe it’s the students, or immigrants, or the internet – who knows? A lot of that diversity found its way onto the live lineup.

Credit the second half of that accomplishment to not getting greedy. The Boston Music Awards organizers priced the general admission ticket at an eminently reasonable $20 (plus feeeezzz). That’s just ten bucks more than you’d pay to rub shoulders with yahoos in the back of the Sil.

Sure, Jack Daniels is adding to the pot. It better be, given the privilege of running its 4-second looped advertisement on two jumbotrons all night.

Operating a music venue with two bars, a boatload of security, and the rest of the trimmings costs money. The books aren’t open, but you’d be surprised if the night was a big moneymaker.

Let’s hope it wasn’t!

Let’s hope just enough cash changed hands to keep the focus on celebrating the local music scene, and convincing everyone involved at the admin level to run it back for another year.

Shout out to all the musicians that performed live: Nay $peaks, Clark D, Divine Sweater, Neemz, Shallow Pools, Cape Crush, Maeko, and more. An awards show is a weird crowd to perform in front of. Not necessarily a tough crowd. But definitely a weird one, which can be its own kind of challenge.

Extra points to the ring light cyclotron. You are my pre-Copernican Revolution everything.

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