Late last month, Future Rock Legends (FRL) posted the article “On Fairness,” which attempts to apply the voting procedures and methodology of the Baseball Hall of Fame to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The latter institution has been plagued with problems throughout its existence, but the backlog of worthy artists is what is hurting the Rock Hall the most. Their many inconsistencies and controversies created such a massive backlog that it’s almost impossible for many of them to ever appear on a ballot. As FRL rightfully states:
One of the primary reasons that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame generates so much derision from fans is that there are literally hundreds of artists who can make a Hall of Fame case, but due to the nature of the induction process, will never get a shot on the ballot. The unfairness of the system creates a visceral reaction among casual observers of the Rock Hall who simply can’t understand how legendary artists don't even get a chance after decades of eligibility.
This is one of the core problems with the induction process at the Rock Hall: there’s a case for a nearly infinite number of artists, yet there are only so many spots available. Factor in the political nature of the process and that nearly explains why there’s a massive backlog of worthy artists who haven’t been nominated, let alone inducted, for induction into the Rock Hall.
Another issue is the lack of transparency from the nomination committee to the general public. Unless a committee member mentions an artist who was brought up during the meeting, that piece of information stays in the room most of the time. And unlike the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Rock Hall never publishes the full results and their lack of transparency will always open them to accusations of bias and snobbery. Something needs to change and it starts with how the Rock Hall communicates with its voters and the general public at large.
Darren Hines and I have decided to take FRL’s suggestion and put it into practice: The Rock Hall Reconsidered Project. We compiled a committee of nine members to create our own version of the Rock Hall’s Nomination Committee using the framework of the Baseball Hall of Fame.* Some aspects of their framework were modified for our Project but we kept most of it largely the same. And one final note: we are solely focusing on the Performers category for this Project. From there, we developed a list of rules to support this process:
Nomination Committee
The nomination committee will determine the performers that are on the ballot for each week's vote. There are nine members:
Nick B.: Co-Chairman; oversees The Audio-Visual Repository
Darren H.: Co-Chairman; oversees Hammer of the Gods
Donnie D.: oversees Donnie’s Blog
Wes G.: educator who teaches a history of rock and roll class
Tom L.: oversees Tom Lane’s Music Blog
Mark L.: oversees The Northumbrian Countdown
Eric L.: co-host of Hall Watchers and oversees E-Rockracy
*Future Rock Legends: Special Councilman to the Committee and Rock Hall Expert who runs the website of the same name. Although they do not serve on the committee, they cast a ballot each round (including the first four rounds) and resolves any issues regarding artists’ years of eligibility.
A google spreadsheet will be published with FRL's lists of all eligible artists for the eligible time period of the vote. This spreadsheet will be updated after each week's vote to indicate the inducted performers, the performers that are currently qualified for the ballot in question and the performers that have been disqualified from the ballot in question.
Members of the nomination committee will be asked to provide their opinions on which eligible artists should be added to the upcoming ballot being discussed at the time by selecting eligible performers from the list.
Depending on how many available spots there are on the ballot, performers with enough consensus will be added as a result of nomination committee members' initial suggestions.
When tiebreakers are necessary, there will be a group vote to fill out the remainder of the ballot.
Nominations will begin after the posting of the previous poll results.
Initial nominations will begin on Tuesdays and end on Thursdays. Tiebreaker voting will take place between Thursdays and Fridays.
Weekly Ballot
A Google poll will be posted on Friday nights with all nominees. This poll will be available to voters that were selected on the recommendation of members of the nomination committee.
The current plan is to have a ballot of 40 nominated performers each week. Think of it like a Top-40 radio station format where there’s plenty of genre and era representation at stake on any given ballot.
Nick will email the entire voting body when the poll is open. To protect the privacy of other members’ email addresses, he will use “BCC” in all communication to the larger voting body. They can only see his email address and no one else’s.
Voters can select 1-10 nominated performers from each ballot.
Polls will close on Monday nights at 9 PM EST each week.
The project is scheduled to conclude with the vote featuring performers that are newly eligible in 2021, performers who released their first recording in 1996 (Belle & Sebastian, Eminem, Fiona Apple, etc.), which is where the Rock Hall would be at that time if not for COVID-related rescheduling in 2020.
Weekly Results
Any performer that appears on 50% or more of the cast ballots (rounding down, so 49.9% or less wouldn't make the cut) is inducted into our Hall Of Fame.
Any performer that appears on 5% or more of the cast ballots (rounding down) is automatically qualified for the next ballot, provided that they haven't previously appeared on more than ten ballots and they haven't been eligible for more than ten years of voting.
Any performer that fails to appear on 5% of the cast ballots is disqualified from appearing on future performers ballots, though they may be considered for the veterans ballot in the future.
Any performer that has appeared on more than 10 ballots or been eligible for induction for more than 10 years is disqualified from appearing on future performers ballots, though they may be considered for the veterans ballot in the future.
Weekly results will be published on Nick's website. The format of the post will be similar to the Baseball Hall Of Fame's yearly vote page on Wikipedia.
Unless a voting body member wants to reveal their ballot via social media and/or in the comments section on Nick’s website, their ballots will be not be released to the general public.
Full ballot results (aka, just the artists and the percentage of votes) will be revealed on Tuesdays.
Ballot Nomination Eligibility
At the beginning of the project, we intend to have five preliminary votes for performers that were qualified for the first Rock & Roll Hall of Fame vote, defined as performers whose first recording was released in or before 1960.
One of the first tasks the Committee decided was which artists should be considered for the “Performers” category. Although the definition is rather loose, our working definition are artists who were impactful, popular and/or influential to rock and roll as an art form from 1954 onward (the general consensus when rock and roll first began). The Committee decided which pre-54-debuting artists should be considered and those artists needed to receive the support of at least 3 committee members to qualify.
These five votes are being done to alleviate the backlog of worthy performers that are eligible at this point and make sure that performers from the 1950s are given similar opportunities for induction to performers eligible later in the project.
The first four of these votes are exempt from qualification rules, which will be applied starting with the fifth ballot.
The first four votes will only involve the members of the Nomination Committee.
Starting with the fifth vote, the rest of the voters (based on the recommendations of the nomination committee) will be invited to participate in the remaining polls.
Starting with the sixth ballot, one new year of eligibility will be added for each round of voting, using the same qualification method of "25 Years Since Their First Recording" used by the Rock Hall. Artist eligibility data can be found on FRL.
The ballots from the sixth ballot forward until the end of the project will consist of eligible performers that qualified from the previous ballot (without being inducted) and performers selected by the nomination committee to fill out the remainder of the 40 performer ballot.
Veterans Ballot
Starting with the voting for the 16th ballot (which will include performers first eligible in 1970), the veterans ballot will be added to the project.
Any performer that appeared on a minimum of five performer ballots will automatically be added to the Veterans ballot beginning with the first round of voting after their ten years of performers ballot eligibility has ended (their 11th year of eligibility).
Performers that didn't appear on a minimum of five performer ballots can be nominated to the Veterans ballot by a member of the nomination committee and potentially added to the Veterans ballot with committee approval.
The Veterans ballot will be voted on by the Nomination Committee to determine inductees.
The specifics of the Veterans ballot vote (how many inductees per vote / % of votes required for induction, eligibility for future Veterans ballots votes, etc.) haven't been determined at this time.
Round One results will be published tomorrow afternoon and Round Two will be published on Thursday. Starting with Round Three, the results will be published on Thursdays and the ballots will be sent out to voters on Fridays.
Thoughts? Comments? Let us know in the comments section below and/or on Twitter. Use the #RockHallReconsideredProject to follow the progress of this Project.
*Please note this Project is not directly affiliated with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
