Idolator Poll Results and the Voice's revenge

For them that’s interested, the Idolator poll is now out, which supplements (or supplants if you like) the upcoming Pazz and Jop poll from the Village Voice.  Other than the results (which not surprisingly weren’t very surprising), the most notable part of it was compiler Michaelangelo Matos’ essay where he revealed Village Voice media’s battle with him:

“New Times—excuse me, Village Voice Media—certainly thought so. Within hours of the poll’s announcement, the chain’s head music editor, the Houston Press’s John Lomax, issued an edict declaring that VVM employees were “not, under any circumstances, [to] contribute to the Idolator poll,” a move that lessened our ranks by somewhere between 50 and 70 ballots. Free speech issues aside, I’d have liked to get those folks in, and acutely missed a handful I count as friends. Still, the 507 voters who came through despite ridiculous email problems (an oversized number of invitees never received ballots, thanks to a combination of overzealous spam filtering and a subject line that included the word “Jackin’”) kept me busy enough. So did extending the deadline twice. VVM, meanwhile, explicitly banned my byline from City Pages, the Minneapolis weekly where I began my writing career. That probably evened things, since the one Jackin’ Pop category that didn’t originate with Pazz & Jop was swiped and/or inspired in part by CP’s annual “Artist of the Year” feature.”