Premios Gardel

The Premios Gardel a la Música (originally called Premios Carlos Gardel), or just Premios Gardel (in English, the Gardel Awards), is an award presented by the Argentine Chamber of Phonograms and Videograms Producers (CAPIF) to recognize the best of Argentine music and to award the talent of Argentine artists in a diversity of genres and categories. The trophy depicts a sculpture of French Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel, one of Argentina's music icons. The annual presentation ceremony features performances by prominent artists, and the presentation of awards that have more popular interest.

The honorees are chosen by a jury consisting of musicians, journalists and other members of the media, event producers, sound engineers, and personalities related to music. The awards are the Argentine equivalent to the American Grammy Awards and the British BRIT Awards. The Premios Gardel have been described as the "most important prize in the country's music business".

After the ACE Awards (1992–1997) failed to become Argentina's standard music awards due to lack of support from the industry, the Gardel Awards appeared to take over that spot.

The awards are named after Carlos Gardel, one of Argentina's earliest and most well-known popular music performers. The awards were organized by CAPIF with the first ceremony held in 1999 for music released between June 1, 1997, and November 30, 1998. The jury for the first awards comprised 500 members.

In 2003, the voting committee was made "truly independent from the record companies, whose staffs can no longer vote," according to then-CAPIF executive director, Gabriel Salcedo. The jury increased to 1,500 members, including artists, producers, and journalists of "every musical genre". In the past, the Gardels were viewed as a "pat on the back" from the industry to its favorite, best-selling artists, but the revamped voting was viewed as giving transparency to the selection process and a new-found credibility to the awards themselves.

Footnotes:

The Gardel Awards are awarded in a series of categories, each of which isolate a specific contribution to the recording industry. The standard awards list nominees in each category from which a winner is selected. Twenty-four Gardel Awards were awarded in the first award ceremony, but the number of awards has grown and fluctuated over time as new categories are added and some older ones removed. As of 2022, the number of categories is forty-eight.

The General Field are standard awards for musical works which do not restrict nominees by genre or some other criterion: