We did it. We got through another year.
A lot of important changes happened last year. We completely overhauled the website, and I brought it back to a Ruby on Rails project that I can now tweak endlessly. So there are a lot of features that I will be working on over the next weeks and months. I plan to roll out a whole new voting system, mostly because what I had been doing was running a report on which blog pieces were getting shared around on socials, but this year I plan to focus a lot more on the radio broadcast. So I need a different way of tabulating the winners for "People's Choice." But for the most part, the format will not be changing. The breakdown of the Top 21 looks like this:
The People's Choice
Every year, 10 artists and their single will be chosen according to the activity of their fans. The most popular songs will rise to the top, and they are listed in no particular order. In 2025, the winners are:
Sherakai - Do I Wanna Know
Howling Hawk - Ramona
Astara Black - New Green Desert
Chris Rawlins - After Dark
B.Miles - Xmas Sox
Kylie Rothfield - Never Loved Somebody
yuraa - Why
The String Revolution - America (From West Side Story)
Theorem of joy - New Spring
Tape House - Jane I’m Drunk
Indie Lost Treasure
Every year, 4 artists swill be chosen along with their singles from the submissions that were posted to this site in the given calendar year. This is purely subjective, and it's hard to quantify exactly what I'm looking for. All I can say is that these are the songs that moved me the most, again in no particular order.
Tommy Mantra - Wake Up (Explicit)
Rudie Edwards - Cool Off
Drugs in Sport - Frequently Sideways
Riley Thompson - Fairy Tale
Artist Awards
Every year, 6 artists total will be chosen for an award that highlights their career as a whole: 3 in the Roots category, 3 in the Indie category. These are artists that have been on my mind over the entire year.
Roots Top 3
Indie Top 3
The Rising Star Award
Finally, one artist every year will be given the "Rising Star" award, which is meant to highlight an impressive period of growth. This year the artist we picked was a band that we wrote about in the early days of CHILLFILTR®. We will always be looking for success stories from bands that we have written about in the past, but it's possible in any given year that we pick someone brand new to the site.
This year, the Rising Star Award goes to Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners.
