For Your Top 20 Songs Of Played On Kvsc: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the KVSC Top 20 ballot is and who runs it

KVSC 88.1 FM is a radio station in St. Cloud, Minnesota, with studios in the basement of Stewart Hall on the St. Cloud State University campus. The station brands itself Your Sound Alternative, and the Top 20 ballot is one of its year-end music features. The program's full working title on the ballot page is Vote for Your Top 20 Albums of 2022 Played on KVSC, which describes the exercise precisely: supporters rank the twenty albums that meant the most to them from the music the station played that year.

The ballot is not a solo effort. The station's own framing is that the Top 20 Albums of 2022 were voted on by listeners and the KVSC volunteers together, and its music pages describe a yearly ritual in which staff and listeners each submit top 20 album picks. That makes this a music best-of ballot with a built-in editorial partner: the volunteers who program the station also file ballots of their own.

For readers comparing Minnesota ballots, this one sits apart from the business readers-choice contests in the state because the thing being ranked is music, not a local shop or service, and the organizer is a broadcaster rather than a publisher of a city magazine.

The dated record: editions, deadlines and the broadcast

Confirmed editions of the ballot cover 2022 and 2023. The 2022 page is the edition whose full text is quoted here, and it carries the program's hardest dates. The deadline to submit a Top 20 ballot was 11:59 p.m. on Monday, January 30. The station paired that deadline with a follow-up event: the Year In Review show, broadcast from 7 to 11 p.m. on Tuesday, January 31, with the top album of the year played in its entirety at 10 p.m. The station's own promotion urged listeners to make a calendar note, and its pitch opened with plenty of time, music lover, which tells you the window was framed as generous.

The recurrence is yearly by the station's own description: every year, KVSC staff and listeners vote on their top 20 picks for album of the year. Both confirmed editions anchor to a January deadline, which fits a year-end album ranking revealed on air in the new year.

Left off the page are the opening day of each ballot window, the rules on how often a supporter may submit, and the schedule for the next edition; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The station maintains its site through the year, but a future ballot page appears only when the station posts it, under its music section at kvsc.org.

How a supporter votes on the KVSC Top 20 ballot today

The mechanic is a ranking exercise, not a single pick. A supporter starts at kvsc.org, where the station posts each cycle's ballot under its music pages, assembles a list of their Top 20 albums from the music KVSC played during the year in question, and submits the ballot before the deadline printed on that page. The 2022 page asked for musical input as Your Sound Alternative prepared to reveal the Top 20 Albums of 2022, which means the ballot feeds directly into an on-air reveal rather than a silent tally.

Three practical points follow from the confirmed page. The ballot is tied to a specific year's edition, so the address of the live ballot changes as the station posts each new cycle, and the reliable route in is through the station's music pages at kvsc.org. The deadline is the binding date, and on the 2022 edition it fell at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, January 30, the night before the Year In Review broadcast. And the tally is shared: the station counts listener ballots alongside the picks of its own volunteers, so the final ranking reflects both audiences.

Because the ballot is a ranking of twenty albums rather than a one-name vote, a supporter's ballot carries more information than a click, and the station's reveal format, playing the winning album in full on air, gives the result a broadcast moment that most web ballots never get.

How this ballot sits beside its Minnesota neighbours

Minnesota has a busy best-of ballot scene, and the KVSC Top 20 is the odd one out. The state's other confirmed ballots are business readers-choice contests: Best of the Midwest, Minnesota's Best, the Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area run by the Brainerd Dispatch, CommunityVotes Duluth, CommunityVotes Rochester, and the Best of the Best from the Duluth News Tribune. Each of those ranks local businesses under a publisher's brand, usually across many categories.

The KVSC ballot ranks albums instead, it runs from a St. Cloud radio station rather than a newspaper or a contest platform, and it produces a single year-end ranking revealed on air rather than a category-by-category results list. Its calendar is also distinct: the confirmed editions anchor to a January deadline, where readers-choice contests typically run on summer or fall cycles.

The audience is where this ballot most differs from its neighbours. A vote here reaches KVSC listeners and the station's volunteers, not a city's shopping public, and the reward for winning is having the album played in its entirety on the Year In Review broadcast, a prize shaped by the station's format rather than by a plaque or a magazine spread.

Building support for an album on the KVSC ballot

Support on this ballot means getting KVSC listeners to include the same albums on their own Top 20 lists before the January deadline. The audience is defined by the station's signal and stream, so the people who can help are the people already tuned to Your Sound Alternative. A push that works here is one aimed at that listening base during the window, not at a general public that may never have heard the albums in question.

No terms covering outside help appear on the station's confirmed ballot, which leaves no printed line between outreach KVSC welcomes and outreach it would strike. What is printed is the shared tally: KVSC volunteers file their own top 20 picks, so a listener campaign moves the ranking only within the space the volunteers' ballots leave. Anyone weighing paid support for a music ballot can read our award votes page for how such purchases are generally structured, with no promise attached, and should weigh it against the station's unpublished terms.