BAMMY Awards return for 2025 with more ways to celebrate Northeast Wisconsin’s music scene

On March 19 and 20, area musicians and music industry professionals will again gather at the Tarlton to find out who will be the recipients of this year’s BAMMY awards with recognitions set to be awarded across 40 categories.
In December, community members were invited to nominate local bands, musicians, performers and other professionals in the music industry from Brown, Door, Kewaunee, Marinette and Oconto counties.

From the nominees, finalists were selected through a voting process open to both the public and the BAMMY Awards Committee.

And at this week’s event, it will be revealed who among the finalists will be honored as 2025 BAMMY Award recipients.

But for event organizer Tarl Knight, the BAMMY Awards are about much more than the awards themselves.

“It’s a way to celebrate all of the wonderful things that go on in the music community,” Knight said. “A lot of folks don’t know how thriving Green Bay’s music community really is or what a success story it is. You have great things going on in Appleton with the Mile of Music and in Madison and Milwaukee and all the other great cities around us in the Midwest. But Green Bay is really an undiscovered gem. It’s kind of a hidden secret that we have.”

In an attempt to uncover that secret and draw attention to Green Bay’s thriving music scene, Knight started the BAMMY Awards last year — an endeavor that turned out to be an overwhelming success.

“I don’t think that I could have gotten a better result… Most of our projects at the Tarlton are big, high stakes projects where we risk a lot in order to create a vision,” Knight said. “And with Green Bay, you never know what’s going to work or what’s going to fail. But the idea of celebrating local people is something I think everybody can come behind for the most part. And while some people thought it was a little competitive or some people maybe got a laugh out of having our own local awards show… The idea of everyone coming together and having a night where we can just celebrate each other really resonated with people.”

It certainly resonated with the artists who were a part of the awards.
“Over the last year, we were able to see the kind of impact that it made on folks,” Knight said. “Bands were bringing their BAMMY Awards trophies to their concerts or setting them up on their merch tables at their gigs and really using it as a source of pride for the place that they fit in their community. I think that really brought the dream full circle, to have this great community, to see them flourish and to be able to celebrate all of them.”

To continue to celebrate the area’s music scene, even more award categories were added to this year’s event.

“We have almost doubled the number of award categories in order to create a much wider array of ways to recognize folks,” Knight said. “This year, we’re including different genres that were important to people that we missed last year, like hip-hop and rap… We’ve got more classical music represented this year. And a wider variety of genres means more for people to connect over. And we’ve got more industry awards that recognize all of the great businesses working behind the scenes to amplify live music in our community.”

Learn more about this year’s BAMMY Awards at thetarlton.com/the-2025-bammy-awards and tune into City Pages’ social media pages for coverage of the awards shows on Wednesday, March 19, and Thursday, March 20.