Organisers of the Diesel U-Music awards 2006 have announced the names of the nine UK finalists for this year's awards - three from each of the three genre categories they run - urban, rock and electronic.
And the finalists are...
Urban/Hip-hop: Caskade (Cardiff), ILLAMADi (London), L-Marie (Glasgow).
Rock: Gilkicker (London), Quad Riot (Rochester), The Very (Edinburgh).
Electronic: David E Sugar (London), Duke Dumont (London), The English Channel (London).
Over a thousand bands entered the competition, with three sets of judges picking out the best from their specialist genre areas: Wall Of Sound's Mark Jones and Clash mag's Simon Harper did electronic, Fierce Panda's Simon Williams and Xfm's David Smith and Nigel Harding did rock, while Hip Hop Connection's Andy Cowan and Xfm's Dan Greenpeace did urban.
If I remember rightly, there will now be some kind of tour after which winners for each category will be selected (in October), with those winners going forward to a global battle. Or something like that.
Diesel UK communications chappy Andy Griffiths told reporters: "We're thrilled with both the quality and quantity of entries this year. We've found nine strong finalists and we're looking forward to working with the final winners in the months following this year's Diesel-U-Music Awards".