TheCASBY Awards were a Canadian awards ceremony forindependent andalternative music, presented annually byToronto,Ontario radio stationCFNY, 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 nameU-Knows, a pun on Canada's mainstreamJuno Awards. The concept was developed byDavid Marsden, the program director at CFNY at the time, when he heard the Juno nominations announced on CBC Radio, and included wasLong John Baldry — who was newly resident in Canada but had already been in the music business for almost 20 years — as most promising vocalist.[1]
They were renamed the CASBYs in 1985, after a listener contest.[2] The 1985 ceremony, hosted byCarole Pope andPaul Shaffer,[3] also marked the first time that the awards were broadcast nationally byCBC Television.[2] In the first year, voter ballots were distributed exclusively by the Canadian music magazineGraffiti.[4] In later years the awards expanded the distribution, printing ballots in a number of major market daily newspapers across Canada.[4]
The 1987 ceremony featured a rare public performance byXTC,[5] although their performance was videotaped in advance of the ceremony.[6] That year's awards were also marred by several organizational snafus, including the wrong winner being initially announced for Album of the Year.[6]
The award's bid for national prominence faltered in the late 1980s, particularly after CFNY's short-lived shift to a more mainstream music format also affected public perception of the awards' identity.[7] During that era, some alienated listeners even picketed the awards ceremony.[8] Beginning in 1993 the awards were pared down to just three categories,[9] and after 1996, amid a sense that the awards had effectively lost their purpose, the awards were discontinued.[10]
They were then revived in 2002, and were presented each year until 2017.
