And the Winner is???

The final results for the Side-Line Awards 2011 are in! Over the past 9 days you could vote for a bunch of nominated bands, releases, labels and magazines. Votes were counted by using the Facebook like button. That generated a total of 14,451 votes and roughly 200,000 visits to all the pages concerned, from the actual main voting page and the many satellite pages that were made for each selected artist and/or band. The high number in visits is explained by the high number of repeat visits from the people who voted to see how good/bad their choice was doing.

Congratulations to all bands, labels and magazines involved, the fact that you were chosen by our readers to be nominated in the first place already shows your work is being appreciated a lot. And here are the winners:

Best Band: the best band was - according to our voters - VNV Nation. The band literally beat the crap out of all other contenders. Only IAMX and Front 242 were able following Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson but the duo still collected over 1000 votes while IAMX got stuck with 826 votes, which still is an amazing score.

Best Album: the best album was - according to our voters - VNV Nation's "Automatic" which again amassed over 1000 votes. It's a stalinist score as the only contender getting closely was IAMX with the "Volatile Times" album (700 votes).

Best Newcomer: the best newcomer was - according to our voters - Virgins O.R Pigeons. Both we and the band's label Alfa Matrix were surprised by their nomination in the first place (they aren't really newcomers to begin with strictly speaking) but the band winning this 'best newcomer' award is crazy. Note that the band is still to release their label debut, but apparently the scarce Virgins O.R Pigeons tracks available are sufficient. It makes the demand for an album rather urgent and wanted. Second was Analog Angel followed by DarkDriveClinic which recently put out an excellent debut.

Best Single: the best single was - according to our voters - Combichrist's "Throat Full Of Glass", followed by Rammstein's "Mein land". Together they took more than 1000 votes home.

Best Label: the best label was - according to our voters - Metropolis which got 431 votes followed by a draw score between Alfa Matrix and Out Of Line. The 4th place was for Mute. Note that Metropolis has close to a monopoly on the US market while the EU market is more fragmented with lots more labels being active here, scattering the votes over more labels (who often originally release many of today's releases before licensing them to Metropolis). Nevertheless, Metropolis is the definite winner here. Congratulations!

Best Live Band: the best live band was - according to our voters - surprise, surprise, VNV Nation. It means that the band won no less than 3 awards this year. Also here they left the competition miles behind with Front 242 stranding at not even half of the +1000 votes that VNV Nation assembled. 2011 was the VNV Nation year and it shows in various other polls of shops and magazines which add the band in their Top 3 releases for last year.
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