Best Country Album Fan Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best Country Album Fan Choice Awards is and who runs it

A country act or label promoting an album in New York State faces a familiar problem with this ballot: the honor sounds national, but the publication behind it is local. WHWK, the radio company operating 981thehawk.com, runs the Best Country Album Fan Choice Awards as part of its on-site contest coverage. The ballot is a fan choice poll in which listeners pick the country album they rate highest for the year, and the station keeps the vote inside its own web property rather than handing it to an outside balloting platform.

That hosting choice matters to anyone studying the program. Because WHWK publishes the vote at its own web address, every rule, date and result comes from one place, and nothing is mediated by a third-party contest vendor. It also means the program's footprint follows the station's audience, which is country radio listeners across New York State. The published ballot names no city, so the market is best described as the state and the station together.

The program's fixed details are gathered in one place below.

Readers who want the wider best-of landscape in the state can compare this radio ballot with The City's Best, Best of New York City, which runs on a very different publishing model.

The dated facts for the country album ballot

Two editions of the Best Country Album Fan Choice Awards are confirmed: 2018 and 2019. Both sit inside a December window, and the evidence for the 2018 round is explicit about its close, since the station's own text told readers the Taste of Country Fan Choice Awards would wrap on Sunday, December 16 at 11:59 PM ET. That gives the program a short, sharp voting season rather than a drawn-out nomination phase, at least in the year that can be dated.

Beyond that close date, the published trail thins out in specific, nameable ways. The station never printed an opening day for the 2018 vote, and no nomination round is dated anywhere on the ballot page. The exact voting and nomination window dates for any cycle, and any platform round dates tied to the station's promotions, are not part of the published text; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The next edition year is a second gap of the same kind. The station's contest coverage has stayed live since 2019, but nothing announced under this program's name fixes a return date, so a reader planning around a future round has no printed year to plan against. The honest summary is that the program ran twice, in Decembers two years apart, and that every date after 2019 rests on whatever 981thehawk.com posts next under its contest section.

How a supporter votes on the album ballot today

The mechanic is deliberately simple. A visitor opens the ballot page on 981thehawk.com, reads the list of albums in contention, selects a favorite and presses the vote control. The 2018 edition's own framing is useful here: the station wrote that Grammy nominees could be found on the ballot for the Best Country Album of 2018, while suggesting the favorites might be albums that were not even eligible for Grammy consideration. In other words, the list rewards reading it in full before voting, because the popular pick may not be the obvious one.

After the window closed, the same page displayed a notice that voting had ended, which is how the station marks a finished round on its own site. There is no published description of a confirmation email, an account requirement or a verification step, so a supporter should expect the plain form behavior the page shows on the day.

The rulebook is where the ballot is silent. WHWK has published no ceiling on repeat voting, nothing about coming back day after day, and no text on who qualifies to cast a vote for this program, and no eligibility wording for the albums themselves beyond what the list shows. Those silences are the station's choices, not omissions by anyone else, and any supporter planning a coordinated push should read the live page's own behavior as the operative rule rather than assuming limits copied from another radio ballot.

How this ballot sits beside its New York neighbours

The Best Country Album Fan Choice Awards is unusual in this market because it votes on creative works rather than businesses. Most of the best-of programs on this site for New York follow a readers-choice shape, where the ballot lists local merchants and services. This program instead asks a radio audience to rank albums, which changes who promotes it: a label or artist rather than a shop owner.

Its neighbours on the site are still useful context for a promoter working the state. Best of Brooklyn covers that borough's businesses, Best of Queens and Best of the Bronx do the same for their boroughs, and Best of Hudson Valley and Best of Westchester carry magazine-run ballots north of the city. Each answers to a different publisher with its own calendar.

What separates WHWK's ballot from all of them is the platform and the prize shape. The station runs the vote on its own web address, ties it to its on-air brand, and scores albums rather than storefronts, so tactics tuned for a readers-choice roster translate only partially. A promoter working this program is rallying music fans, not customers, and the December window compresses the whole campaign into a few weeks.

Strengthening support for an album on the fan ballot

Support for this program is earned where the station's audience already lives. WHWK promotes its contests on air and through 981thehawk.com, so an album's best asset is a fanbase that listens, and a direct ask that sends those fans to the ballot page during the December window will outperform anything aimed at a general audience. Because the ballot mixes Grammy nominees with albums that were not Grammy-eligible, a campaign should introduce the album by name and tell supporters exactly which entry to select, since the list itself will not do that work.

The station has published no rule text on outside help for this ballot, which cuts both ways: nothing forbids a coordinated push, and nothing protects one either. The organizer's silence is not an invitation to automation, and a push that trips the site's own defenses would cost the entry whatever support it had gathered. The safe posture is volume from real fans inside the window, timed early rather than left to a single late-day burst.

For methods that fit fan-voted radio ballots like this one, work through getting more votes online, and treat the station's live page as the final word on what a repeat visit or a shared link may do.