Best Bassist Loudwire Music Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Bassist Loudwire Music Awards ballot is

The problem for anyone nominated here is simple: the ballot is real, the audience is local, and the published facts are thin. WGRD-FM, the commercial rock station broadcasting at 97.9 FM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, runs the Best Bassist ballot under the Loudwire Music Awards name on its own website. It is a best-of style music award where the listening public, not a judging panel, decides the winner.

The clearest picture of the format comes from the 2017 edition. That ballot put six worthy musicians head to head for the Best Bassist title, with Hotel Indigo named as the presenter of the category. The page asked readers to vote for their favorite nominee, which makes this a straight public-vote award rather than a nomination-then-shortlist structure.

Because the station hosts the vote on wgrd.com itself, there is no third-party balloting platform between the supporter and the ballot. That matters in practice: the rules, the nominee list and the closing time all live on pages the station controls, and nothing sits on an outside domain that could change without the station's involvement.

Facts at a glance

The dated timeline: which editions ran and when the window closes

The confirmed edition years for this ballot are 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The early run skips years, with nothing confirmed between 2017 and 2019 or between 2019 and 2021, but from 2023 onward the ballot has appeared in three consecutive cycles. That recent streak is the strongest sign the award is now a regular fixture on the station's calendar, though the station itself has not printed a schedule promise.

The one fully dated window belongs to the 2017 edition. Its page stated that the voting period ends Oct. 2 at 11:59PM ET, and that winners would be announced after the close. The same page carried the only vote rule the page stated: supporters could vote up to once per hour for their favorite nominee.

What the station has not published is the current picture. No opening date, closing date or nominee count for the latest cycle appears ahead of the ballot itself, and no separate rules page spells out eligibility or a per-supporter cap for recent editions; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The 2017 hourly rule and the Oct. 2 close are the last figures the station put in writing, and each new ballot page has carried its own terms since.

For a supporter planning a push, that means the calendar has to come from the live page, not from a summary like this one. The station's concert calendar and homepage are the practical places a new ballot surfaces first.

How a supporter votes in the WGRD Best Bassist ballot today

Nothing about the WGRD ballot is complicated to use. A supporter opens the Best Bassist page on wgrd.com, reads the nominee list for the current edition, picks a favorite and submits. In 2017 the page framed it as voting for your favorite nominee in the on-page poll, with the once-per-hour allowance meaning a dedicated fan could return twelve times a day if they kept the rhythm.

That hourly return is the single most important fact about this ballot's mechanic. Unlike awards that lock a supporter to one vote for the whole run, the WGRD ballot rewards steady repetition. A nominee whose fans vote at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day of the window builds a lead that a one-time burst cannot match, because the cap is per hour rather than per person per contest.

No account creation is described on the ballot page, and no email verification step appears in the 2017 text. The supporter simply picks and submits. Whether later editions added a login or a captcha is not stated anywhere on the current page, so the first visit to a new ballot should include a quick read of whatever instructions the station prints above the nominee list.

The closing time is the other mechanic to watch. The 2017 window shut at 11:59PM ET on Oct. 2, an end-of-day deadline in Eastern Time. Supporters in other time zones should convert that, because a vote cast at 10 p.m. Pacific lands after the ballot has already closed in Michigan.

How this ballot sits beside its Michigan neighbours

Michigan runs a crowded field of public-vote awards, and the Best Bassist ballot is unusual among them for two reasons: it is a single music category rather than a multi-category readers poll, and it lives on the broadcaster's own web domain instead of a contest platform. Most of its neighbours are broad best-of surveys covering dozens of local businesses at once.

The closest structural relative is the Detroit Music Awards, another Michigan music award where public support decides honours, though that program is anchored to Detroit rather than Grand Rapids. On the broad-survey side, the Grand Rapids Magazine Best of GR serves the same Grand Rapids audience across many categories, and the Detroit Community Choice Awards and Detroit News Readers' Choice do the same for the southeast of the state.

Two further siblings round out the set: the Best of Northern Michigan survey and the DN Readers Choice Awards. WGRD-FM also runs its own tattoo-artist ballot for West Michigan, so the station treats public voting as a regular format rather than a one-off.

What makes the bassist ballot different for a nominee is focus. A business competing in a fifty-category readers poll fights for attention inside a long list; a musician on a six-name ballot is one of a handful of choices, which makes every hourly return from a fan proportionally heavier.

Strengthening support in a once-per-hour music ballot

A six-name ballot with an hourly cap rewards organisation over spend. The confirmed rule from the 2017 edition, one vote per hour, means a nominee's job is to turn casual fans into scheduled ones: a band reminding its own audience that the limit resets every hour is using the ballot exactly as designed. Reminders timed to the closing deadline, the last hours before the window shuts, are where hourly ballots are usually won.

The station has published no rule on outside help for this category, so the honest line is the one the ballot itself draws: vote often within the printed limit, and never in a way that would look like manipulation to the publisher. WGRD-FM controls its own ballot and can act on anything it judges abusive, which is reason enough to keep every push inside the stated rules.

For a wider view of what works in public-vote contests of this shape, our votes guide covers outreach that fits hourly-cap ballots, and the service overview explains the general options without promising any outcome.