Welcome to the 9th annual Best of Music readers' survey and best of luck winning the Wii (see below). The poll covers Halifax music released and performed during the 2010 calendar year, so please keep your votes timely and local. This is not the place for Arcade Fire, Kanye, Springsteen, Rihanna or Gaga (except for maybe the question about tours you wish came to town).

To enter, you must be a registered member of The Coast's website (you can sign up now if you haven't before) and you must vote in a minimum of 10 categories. The poll is open for voting from January 1 until January 31 at 10am. While we encourage musicians to lobby their fans to get out the vote, only one entry per reader is allowed—we have ways of finding ballot stuffers and other cheaters—in order for a vote or ballot to qualify. We will tabulate all the qualified votes and announce the results March 24, 2011.

Every reader who enters a valid ballot automatically gets entered in our prize draw. Two winners will be chosen at random. First prize is a Wii console, second prize is a Retro N3 console (it plays NES, SNES and Genesis games, and the prize includes a few games to get you started). Both prizes are courtesy of The Last Game Store, which normally only deals in games, but for the Best of Music awesomely stepped up to provide the consoles.

And now, on to the survey. One, two, three, four…