Boston Music Awards: Getting older or old?

New Kids on the Block helped get the Boston Music Awards off to a fast start at the Wang Theatre 20 years ago, and also performed at the 1991 show (above). (Justine Hunt / Globe staff / file)

Tomorrow night the Boston Music Awards will celebrate their 20th anniversary at the Orpheum, and they're bringing out the big guns. The recently reunited rock band Extreme will perform. So will Bobby Brown, who is being inducted into the BMA Hall of Fame, presumably in honor of his New Jack Swing work in the '80s and not more recent forays into reality television and the legal system. Sully Erna of Godsmack, JoJo, the Click Five, Lori McKenna, Augustana (a Midwest band that wrote a song called "Boston") and Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer, this year's honorary chairman, have also cleared space on their calendars to mark two decades of . . . what, exactly?

We enjoy a vibrant music scene in Boston. With roughly a quarter-million college students setting up house each year there's a built-in audience, and no shortage of singers and guitarists to fill the nightclub stages. The Boston Music Awards were founded in 1987 by event producer Candace Avery to pay tribute to the city's talent pool. But the event wasn't designed as a feel-good festivity for deserving locals. It would be a regional Grammys, a night of glamour and pageantry that transformed Beantown into a chilly facsimile of Hollywood for a couple of hours. Over the years a handful of bona fide stars have played the ceremonies - New Kids on the Block, Donna Summer, James Taylor - although hometown heroes Aerosmith have never deigned to perform. More often than not the event has felt sadly aspirational, slapped together and starry-eyed and all-too representative of Boston's provincial sensibilities.

We're not, by and large, a pop town. We are a hotbed of punk bands, folk singers, and indie-rockers, and we like to think of ourselves as unmoved by - even above - celebrity glitz. But at the same time Boston is burdened by an underdog identity. We're not cool like LA, or cutting edge like New York, and we prove it with every breathless film-set sighting and BMA ballot. John Mayer's brief tenure as a Berklee student doesn't qualify him as a musician with strong ties to the local music community, and neither does Bonnie Raitt's couple of years at Radcliffe in the late '60s. You can bet neither considers him or herself a Boston musician. Yet their names turn up again and again alongside the locals on BMA ballots, in a cringe-worthy bid for star power.

The awards show debuted with a bang - screaming New Kids fans filled every seat at the Wang Theatre 20 years ago - but decibels faded quickly. The event moved to the scruffier Orpheum in the early '90s and generated little interest beyond the nominated bands, their managers, and a familiar assortment of scenesters talking in the lobby. In 1997 Avery launched the NEMO conference and music showcases, modeled after South by Southwest, the sprawling industry gathering in Austin, and the annual CMJ Music Marathon in New York City. Avery's tenure was dogged by accusations of financial self-interest and declining community support, and the showcases - conceived as a breeding ground for new discoveries and record deals - failed to lure a critical mass of label scouts and buzz-worthy bands to Boston.

In 2003 Chip Rives, a sports and entertainment marketing executive, bought both NEMO and the BMAs, eager to boost the events' profile with his passion for music and branding expertise. Rives is a friend, and I can vouch firsthand for his enthusiasm and his efforts. He lined up big-name sponsors, traveled the country recruiting bands, and fantasized in good faith about building an event that would shut down entire city blocks, lure swarms of international badge-holders, and expand to include year-round programming.

Instead, NEMO was canceled this year.

What Rives didn't visualize was the near-impossibility of building a world-class industry event in a town that calls itself the Hub but operates as an outpost. In 2000, Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun traveled here to deliver the keynote speech at NEMO, which seemed to signal a deepening credibility for the event, but it turned out to be an aberration. With each passing year NEMO appears less capable of attracting big-name panelists and performers who will in turn attract the registrants and advertisers who pay the bills. Last year's conference was depressingly slight. The BMAs, held at Avalon, felt more like a party than an awards gala. And that wasn't a bad thing.

The official line is that NEMO will be revamped for 2008, but many wonder if it will - or should - be back at all. Does the music business really need a third-tier conference? By the same token, does Boston need the BMAs? This year's award show, of which bos ton.com is a sponsor, is a charitable event, with proceeds benefiting the Music Drives Us Foundation and the Berklee City Music Program. And a win surely carries some cachet, mainly early on in an artist's career, like a gold star on a press release. But Rives and other Bostonians are still in the mindset that bigger and more famous is better, when in fact similar events (ironically, the Los Angeles Music Awards) have devoted themselves exclusively to honoring independent artists, without any pretense of pedigree. Of course those names don't generate much wattage or revenue, which begs the question: Who do the BMAs serve?

The answer, at least hypothetically, is Boston's musical artists. But the relevance of the results (nominees are selected by a committee of local industry types and winners are chosen via online public vote) is not especially clear. Moreover, one has to wonder if a popularity contest, even under the umbrella of a prestige bash, is of much value in a music community that isn't noted for its cohesiveness, and during a time of enormous flux and uncertainty in the industry. Maybe it's time for the powers that be to take a cue from the artists they're honoring and do some serious soul-searching.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/ music/blog.