British honor online music community

Gibson's Robot Guitar was awarded a BTDMA for Best Hardware.

(Credit: Gibson)

There are some people who actually do embrace the evolutionary impact the Internet has had on music distribution.

A you may have guessed, it's not the music industry. It is the communications industry.

In 2004, British Telecommunications (BT), which offers telecom, broadband, and networked IT services in over 170 countries, became the sponsor of the Interactive Music Awards. Now called the BTDMAs (BT Digital Music Awards), the show exclusively honors digital music entertainment. Elevated to better and bigger venues over the years, it's now televised.

Not surprisingly, the 2008 BTDMA Artist of the Year award went to Radiohead. The group had an unprecedented online album release in 2007 in which it let fans decide how much they wanted to pay for the album download.

Coldplay won for Best Rock/Indie Artist and Best Official Web Site for a musical group.

Locomotion Kylie

(Credit: Kylie.com)

Kylie Minogue won Best Pop Artist and Best Innovation. The Best Innovation award is for an offshoot of her official Web site called KylieKonnect.com. The "social network for Kylie fans around the world" allows fans to create their own profile pages. The site also includes a wide selection of Kylie anime characters that fans can have greet them on the official part of the site, such as Locomotion Kylie.

Best Music Hardware award went to the Gibson Robot Guitar. While technically it's not really a robot, opening up the guitar reveals a circuit board that enables the instrument to tune itself in a matter of seconds.

BTDMA, which also included "people's choice" categories, has posted the full list of 2008 winners.