CASBY Awards

The CASBY Awards are a Canadian awards ceremony for independent and alternative music, presented annually by Toronto, Ontario radio station CFNY, currently branded as 102.1 The Edge. CASBY is an acronym for Canadian Artists Selected By You.

The awards were first presented in 1981 under the name U-Knows, a pun on Canada's mainstream Juno Awards. The concept was developed by David Marsden, the program director at CFNY at the time, when he heard the Juno nominations announced on CBC radio, and included was Long John Baldry — who was newly resident in Canada but had already been in the music business for almost 20 years — as most promising vocalist.

They were renamed the CASBYs in 1985, after a listener contest. The 1985 ceremony, hosted by Carole Pope and Paul Shaffer, also marked the first time that the awards were broadcast nationally by CBC Television. In the first year, voter ballots were distributed exclusively by the Canadian music magazine Graffiti. In later years the awards expanded the distribution, printing ballots in a number of major market daily newspapers across Canada.

The 1987 ceremony featured a rare public performance by XTC, although their performance was videotaped in advance of the ceremony. That year's awards were also marred by several organizational snafus, including the wrong winner being initially announced for Album of the Year.

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