The Planning Committee for the 2011 Ghana Music Awards scheme has announced that it has officially closed nominations or this year’s awards. By this announcement, the GMA’s will not be acknowledging any new entries for consideration for awards from Monday, February 7.

According to the committee, the process of submission and data collection has been very successful this year. Many of the entries received from the nationwide data collection exercise have been signed by their respective management as authentic entries that satisfy GMA requirements of commercial release and date of release (December 1, 2010 – November 30, 2011). A commercial Release as used by the scheme refers to any musical work that can be obtained commercially through Ring Tones, CD, VCD, DVD, Cassette purchases and Electronic release (Media cards and internet downloads).

What remains now as organizers work towards the grand launch is for the Planning Committee to complete work on the nomination and categorization process. At the end of this process, the scheme will reveal the top five or six nominations per category that will be published for the general public to vote their best.

The Committee is also working on the nominations for the Industry Categories that require a great deal of knowledge in the music industry. To ensure due diligence, the Committee members listen to a majority of the songs that have been categorized as much to refresh their memory as to effectively gauge their relevance for nomination and subsequent inclusion into the final list. The Committee last met on Sunday, February 6 to work on the categories. It is hoped that a substantial portion of the work would have been completed by the end of the week so organizers can work at releasing the nominations for this year.

Meanwhile, on the subject of some producers nominating to be exempted from the GMA’s, the Planning Committee has decided to go ahead and nominate the works should they qualify for nomination as the works are already in the public domain. The Committee has decided that should the work of said artistes make it into the final nominations list and win, they can decide to pick up their awards or not.