The time has arrived for one of the most important awards of the year, the Mercury Prize proves year on year to be the launch pad for many an artist, even without winning the prize, just a nomination can sky rocket an artist from background noise to main stage heroes overnight. Launched as an alternative to the far too mainstream Brit Awards, the Mercury Prize was created for the benefit of those who aren't quite in the "inner circle" of music, by which I mean label controlled merchandise. People who both live and think outside of the box. True to it's purpose, the Mercury gives plenty of worthy acts year after year the kind of critical acclaim they truly deserve and this year has been no different. But to many, the Mercury Prize is perceived to be far from as ground breaking and fair as it portrays. Often coming under criticism for how pretentious and predictable it has become. First of all, let's establish how Mercury envisage themselves, they announced the nominations with this statement: "True to Mercury Prize roots the albums celebrate a diverse range of styles and genres, the twelve albums share a common sense of adventure, pushing music in fresh and dynamic directions". This is a pretty straight forward statement of intent as was established by the origins of the award, to award people for pushing music in "fresh and dynamic directions" while also celebrating a "diverse range of styles and genres". However, if you take a walk to the Mercury website itself, they describe the full list of nominations as follows: "This year's shortlist celebrates a fascinating year for British and Irish music, marked by a wonderful range of musical voices urgent, reflective, upbeat and tender, acoustic and electronic, and all with something intriguing to say". This doesn't somewhat match up with the initial specification, in fact this list of details is quite specific. Now sadly, there will always be artists who miss out when they truly deserved a spot, after all there are only 12 spaces available. We can sit and whine year on year about the prize's flaws and snobbery, but this is the time to bring to light the artists that deserve the same recognition. So who missed out this year?