Vote Now for Canada's Best Independent Music Video Online at Dropout Entertainment

TORONTO, Jan. 12, 2021 /CNW/ - Voting is open for Canada's best independent music video released in 2020 at Dropoutentertainment.ca and the votes are rolling in. This is the last week left to vote for the first round of nominations. The first round of public voting will close on Sunday, January 17, 2021 at noon EST, the finalists will be announced on January 18, 2021, at noon EST. The second round of voting will then open and run until January 31, 2020. The overall winners, as well as Canada's Best Independent Music Video will be announced on a livestream event, the date of which has yet to be announced..

Early last week Dropout Entertainment opened up voting for the Third Annual Canadian Independent Music Video Awards on their website. Since announcing this year's long-list of nominees and publishing the video contest's voting platform, the Dropout Entertainment website has been receiving votes from all across Canada, and garnering exposure for all the independent Canadian artists involved in the contest.

Voting opened on January 4, 2021, and the first round of voting will continue until January 17, 2021. At that point in time, the Dropout Entertainment editorial team will review the voting results. The finalist videos will be announced on January 18, 2021, at noon, voting will reopen and stay open, until January 30, 2021, at midnight EST. The overall contest winners will be announced on a special-event livestream this February. Winners are chosen by a combination of fan-submitted votes and votes from the Dropout editorial team. Editorial votes are based on a combination of creativity, originality, cultural relevance, and production resourcefulness.

The overall winner of this year's awards will receive an award statue for Canada's Best Independent Music Video of 2020 along with a $500 cash prize provided by Toronto digital marketing agency Toronto Creatives Inc, a year's worth of loose leaf tea provided by Canadian tea company Tea Squared, a $100 gift certificate to Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, and a 1-year subscription to Sonicbids. All category winners will receive an award statue for their category as well as a gift pack including prizes from this year's award sponsors Tea Squared, SonicBids, Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, and Steamwhistle Brewery.

This is the third annual iteration of the awards, which started in 2019 and the team at Dropout Entertainment anticipates it being the biggest year for the event yet, despite the overall global-circumstances. The Dropout team, after reviewing all the submissions and nominations from the past year, all created by Canadian musicians and filmmakers, is impressed, to say the least.

Jesse Read, Dropout Entertainment's Founder had this to say about the music videos in this year's contest, "It's impressive what (Canadian) artists are capable of, even under the circumstances that last year presented, and everything that people are still dealing with. At the start of this pandemic, I didn't know if there would even be enough Canadian videos put out this year for the contest to work, but we've actually had more eyes and ears on the awards than ever before!"

The team at Dropout Entertainment welcomes the extra attention on the videos and sees it as not only a win for the website, but also a win for all the participating Canadian independent musicians.

The increased traffic over previous years is likely due to the additional entries the awards received this year. The long-list of approved nominations this year was over 70 videos stronger than the 100 nominations the Dropoutentertainment.ca website featured in last year's version of the contest.

Last year's awards saw genre-category winners like Andrew Waite in Indie, The Heels in Country, and Dakota Bear winning in both the Indigenous and Hip-Hop categories. The 2nd Annual Awards also saw Bleeker win for the overall Best Canadian Independent Music Video for their video Straight for the Money.

The team at Dropout hopes the CIMVAs will provide Canadian music fans some much-needed entertainment in these uncertain times, and perhaps more importantly they hope you find new music to make a long-lasting connection with.

For more information visit the contest, to view all 175 of this year's nominations, and to vote for your favourite, visit the contest page on Dropout Entertainment's website.

SOURCE Dropout Entertainment

Media Contacts: Jesse Read, [email protected], 647.863.3155; Benjamin Gibson, [email protected], 647.883.1550