The Scots Trad Music Awards will be an annual celebration of Scotland's rich musical traditions. From the length and breadth of the country, these Awards aim to highlight Scotland's wonderful traditional music in all it's glory and to create a high profile opportunity bringing the music and music industry into the spotlight of media and public attention. The first ceremony, at The Queen's Hall in Edinburgh will take place on Saturday, 13th September 2003.

We aim to encompass all of Scotland's thriving musical culture from Gaelic song, Folk music, Scottish Dance, to Pipe Bands and a host of others inbetween. Although this is an ambitious project we totally believe that to get the recognition the music deserves, the scene needs to project itself as a unit. We have chosen fifteen awards for this first year and we could have had a lot more! (List below) We know that people will have other ideas and in future years we will look to increase the number of awards. For this year however we need to keep it manageable.

Background to the Scots Trad Music Awards

In 2000, Simon Thoumire, Clare McLaughlin and Elspeth Cowie recognising the lack of positive media attention for traditional music/musicians in Scotland, started the Young Scottish Traditional Musician Award (now called BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award) to support and encourage young musicians in the pursuit of a career in traditional music. The award has been very successful and is now entering its fourth year.

A natural development from the Young Traditional Musician Award is the all-encompassing Scots Trad Music Awards to recognise the best practitioners across the spectrum of musical traditions, and highlight Scotland's best traditional music to its people and media.

The Scots Trad Music Awards is an initiative by Hands up for Trad, a new organisation set up to raise traditional music awareness and steer the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award, Scots Trad Music Awards and Trad Music Day.

Definition of Scottish:
We thought long and hard about this and we decided that the artist(s) must be living and working out of Scotland for the last five years or born in Scotland. This will always be a hot topic and we will constantly revise it.

Back to nominations.