Winning a Wammie isn’t nearly as glamorous as winning a Grammy, but Jeffery Tribble, Jr. hopes his local music awards could help D.C. artists win real Grammys someday.

Tribble is the CEO of The MusicianShip, a music education nonprofit that is putting on the awards show this Sunday at the Lincoln Theatre on U Street. It is also hosting a related music conference and series of performances on Saturday at Decades in Dupont Circle.

The MusicianShip inherited the Wammies after the awards’ previous steward, the Washington Area Music Association, disbanded in June 2018. WAMA started the awards show in 1985, but hadn’t put it on since 2016 due to financial troubles, flagging membership, and a questionable nomination procedure.

Many local musicians didn’t lose any sleep when the Wammies were cancelled. Artists and critics had been calling WAMA’s leadership and processes into question since the late 1990s, particularly regarding the ways in which artists were nominated for Wammies.

“Acts that hadn’t put out new music in three years kept winning the same awards,” said Chris Naoum of Listen Local First, an organization that advocates for the local music scene. The dues-paying WAMA members controlled the nomination process, and Tribble described the group as “a bit homogenous.”

This year’s awards process has been revamped by The MusicianShip’s leadership. Now, musicians and bands have to have released a record in the past year to be eligible for an award. (Naoum cited an incident in which one band won the same award four years in a row, even though its members hadn’t produced a single new record in that time.)

Under the new process, anybody could nominate an artist for an award. A panel of 50 judges—a mix of journalists, music professors, DJs and other industry folk—selected the finalists and will vote on the winners. Tribble hopes the new slate of judges will “bring a little more integrity to the process.”

“The Wammie awards didn’t always get a great rap,” he said. “We’re not naïve about that. We know we have a lot of work to do, but we’re up to the task.”

The number of categories has also been slashed from over 100 to 62, in part due to complaints about the award show’s length. This year’s categories still include a wide breadth of genres, from local staples like punk and go-go to more niche areas like bluegrass and techno. A total of 150 bands and solo artists were nominated—check out the full list of nominees here.

“If you’re new to D.C. and you don’t have an entry point into the music community, the list of [Wammie] finalists is an easy entry point,” Naoum said.

Tribble said he’s proud to have been able to help resurrect an awards program that’s more than 30 years old, “but then contemporize it, diversify it, and make it more accessible.”

Ultimately, he said, he expects to see Wammie award-winning artists winning real Grammys. You hear that, Lady Gaga and Childish Gambino?

This story originally appeared on WAMU.