With online voting (at www.emeawards.com) officially closed in all categories and promotion efforts amped up for the 7th Annual Excellence in Music and Entertainment (EME) Awards, the organizers are extremely happy with their accomplishments thus far as they prepare for the event which takes place at on Saturday, March 12, 2011 at The East Lawn of the historical Devon House site, Hope Road in Kingston, Jamaica.

“I am extremely happy with the local and international coverage that we have garnered this year. It is mind blowing!” event founder and CEO Richard Burgess said.

“Unique visitors to the EME web site have quadrupled in the past week and the number of votes have gone through the roof, surpassing what we received last year. We have persons visiting the site from as many as 176 different countries around the world including the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Russian Federation, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Belgium, Kenya, Poland, India, China and Norway. This demonstrates the international appeal of our music, which speaks to the need for us as a county to seize the opportunities to properly market and promote our music” he indicated.

Earlier this year the EME Awards brokered an important deal with IMAGES LLC, a leading US based, Jamaican PR company to handle the international publicity campaign for the 2011 event.

“Having IMAGES LLC on board has given our campaign a huge lift, especially in garnering a presence in the international hip hop community. In fact we have received positive feedback about the event in just about all the major hip hop publications within the US, which is a first for us. Through our relationship with IMAGES LLC, we have also been able to engage a number of print and electronic media entities in the Diaspora, which is extremely important in getting the word out to that market segment” he stated.

Regarding online voting this year, Burgess indicated that he was thankful to all those who voted, as it demonstrates that a wider cross section of the music listening public (both in Jamaica and abroad) have an interest in participating in the process. This he said has strengthened the credibility of the EME Awards and distinguished it as the foremost reggae awards event of its type in the genre. Burgess acknowledged there were attempts by unscrupulous persons to cast illegal votes via sophisticated IP manipulation, however, he assured stake holders that his capable IT team was able to block and filter out all illegal voting.

“There were numerous attempts to hack our site by certain individuals but those efforts were thwarted as we are determined that it is the wishes of the many and not the few that will be counted!” he reiterated.

The 2011 (EME) Awards will recognize the top performers in approximately 30 award categories. A powerful contingent of hip-hop, reggae and dancehall acts will perform including Trina, Eve, Jah Cure, Lady Saw, Bounty Killer, Etana, Elephant Man, Wayne Wonder, Tifa, Andrew Tosh, Nomaddz among others.