SAY it loud for Hamish at Scottish album awards

The Scottish Album of the Year was of far more relevance to shops when it started in 2012 and indeed the winner, Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat’s Everything’s Getting Older, was a big seller in the shop but as time has gone on the importance of an album winning from a retail viewpoint has considerably waned.

Hamish Hawk is on the shortlist for Scottish Album of the Year

Albums on the list regularly now don’t even have distribution or sometimes even physical product, and in the beginning if that was the case the organisers would arrange for some CDs to be produced and a distributor for them found so shops were able to support all the artists, but unfortunately that is no longer the case.

This is also true in the wider picture now as shops are often not even considered by local artists even if they have physical product, choosing instead to go down a purely online route. Often a shop will be offered an album long after its release date once sales have dried up for the artist, which of course is the worst time to then expect a shop to start selling an album.

Back in 2014 Hamish James Hawk, as he was then, brought in a couple of boxes of his CD for us to sell and though it took a while we sold them all. When Kathryn Joseph had her first album out in 2015 we did have to contact her label, Hits The Fan, who we already knew of as they had previously released the Frightened Rabbit Sing The Greys album, but they were very pleased we had made the effort to make contact and were very helpful. All of that was of course ten years ago and things are now very different both for artists and shops.

There have always been some reservations about how the SAY long list is chosen. The long list is now based on the votes of 100 industry professionals and music fans. I say now as originally it was just people in the music industry and I’m not sure when “fans” were first included or how they are chosen.

Interestingly there have also been comments this year about the 2025 Mercury Prize with artists outside London clearly underrepresented on the shortlist. This is carried through to the winners as there had only been three winners who are not from London from 2015 to 2024. With the Mercury Prize coming from Newcastle this year supposedly showing it is not London biased conspiracy theorists were proved correct when home town boy Sam Fender won this week.

With 130 more nominees coming from the UK capital than the next most-shortlisted region over the Mercury’s 34-year history it is clear that artists in the other regions do start with a massive disadvantage. The SAY Award meanwhile has been accused of picking winners based on age, sex, region and genre rather than music – so every base covered there! As Kathryn has won the SAY Award before all of us at Avalanche will be hoping this year sees a win for Hamish.