Hiper Limited

General information

The SAY (Scottish Album of the Year) Award is a prestigious and exciting arts prize produced by the Scottish Music Industry Association (SMIA), with confirmed partners for 2017 including Paisley for UK City of Culture 2021, Creative Scotland, Black Bottle, TicketWeb and PPL. The award celebrates, promotes and rewards the most outstanding Scottish albums released each year. Respected by artists and valued by the industry, The SAY Award is responsible for a surge in musical discovery and an explosion of impassioned debate on social media. The SMIA is encouraging artists, labels and the general public to nominate eligible albums released between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2017.

Once all eligible albums have been collated, 100 impartial ‘Nominators’, chosen from press, radio, music venues, jazz, classical, traditional folk, retail and elsewhere in the arts, will consider titles from The SAY Award’s Eligible Album List, nominating their five favourite albums and ranking them in order of preference. The 20 highest scoring albums will make up The SAY Award Longlist for 2017, announced on May 24th. The Longlist will be further whittled down to a shortlist of 10 albums, one of which will be chosen by the public during a 72-hour public vote (12-14 June) and the others decided by a panel of prestigious judges. The SAY Award 2017 Shortlist will be announced on June 15th as part of a BBC Quay Sessions show, with the award ceremony then taking place on June 28th in the surroundings of Paisley's elegant Town Hall, in support of Paisley’s bid for Paisley to become UK City of Culture 2021. The winning artist will pick up a £20,000 cash prize, provided by long term Award partner Creative Scotland. The 9 runners up will each be awarded a £1,000 prize, as well as an exclusively designed piece of artwork from the SAY Award Design Commission.

SAY Award Design Commission

Alongside The SAY Award’s warm welcome to Paisley for 2016 and 2017, we were delighted to partner with Incube Renfrewshire to find this year’s SAY Design Commission Winner. Partnering with Invest in Renfrewshire’s new business incubator. With no set parameters or restrictions on format, artists and designers were encouraged to think creatively about the connection between art and music or the context of Scottish art and music within their proposals.