北极星音乐奖（加拿大）

Jury and selection

There is no submission process or entry fee for the prize, and jurors select what they consider the five best Canadian albums released in the previous year. Ballots are tabulated with each number-one pick awarded five points and a number-two pick awarded four points. A list of 40 titles is released in mid-June and sent back to the jury, which re-submits five top picks.

Ballots are re-tabulated and the top ten titles are the Polaris short list, which is released in early July. A group of 11 jurors (the "Grand Jury") meets in Toronto in late September to choose the winner. The nominated artists (or bands) perform, and the winner is announced by the previous year's winner. Each shortlisted album has one grand juror to advocate for it; ten jurors are selected for naming a shortlisted album as their top pick in the balloting, and the remaining juror did not vote for any shortlisted albums.

The Polaris Music Prize board of directors selects the jurors from a list of over 200 Canadian music journalists, bloggers, and broadcasters. No one with a direct financial relationship with an artist can be a jury member. Enlisting music journalists, broadcasters and bloggers as judges attracts attention to good music in a cluttered commercial landscape and a fractured music scene. Former CBC Q host and first Polaris Gala host Jian Ghomeshi was quietly removed from the juror pool on November 3, 2014.

In 2026, the prize announced that it was dropping the grand jury deliberation process, and opening the voting on the final winner to a full 205-member voting panel.

Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize

The Polaris jury introduced the Polaris Heritage Prize (later known as the Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize), an annual award program to honour classic Canadian albums released before the creation of the Polaris Prize, in 2015.

Heritage Prizes, selected by public vote from a shortlist of five nominees by a Heritage Prize jury, were awarded in their first year in the 1960s–1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000–2005 categories. In the second year, the shortlists were increased to 10, the categories shifted to 1960–75, 1976–85, 1986–1995 and 1996–2005, and a second prize was awarded by a jury with the winner of the public vote. The jury award ensures that albums which were artistically important but not necessarily commercially popular have a fair chance of winning; the jury does not meet to make its choice until after the popular-vote winner has been determined, in order to ensure that the two awards go to two different albums.

As of 2019, the Heritage Prize has been narrowed to a single shortlist rather than multiple separate by-decade categories. Prior to 2025, the nominees were announced at the Polaris ceremony, with the voting period then opening until the winners were announced about a month later; as of 2025, the nominees are now announced in the summer during the lead-up to the ceremony, with the winners announced at the same ceremony as the main album and song prizes.

SOCAN Polaris Song Prize

The SOCAN Polaris Song Prize was announced and presented for the first time in 2025, replacing the dormant SOCAN Songwriting Prize. Unlike the main album prize, which starts with a longlist of 40 albums before being winnowed to a shortlist of ten, the song prize starts with a longlist of 20 songs before being reduced to a shortlist of five.

Nominees for the song prize are drawn primarily from the album nominees, but may also include songs not from a nominated album. Artists may also have more than one song nominated in the same year, although to date no artist has exceeded two.

Ceremonies

The 2018 Polaris sponsors included the CBC, the Government of Canada, FACTOR, Ontario Media Development Corporation, Slaight Communications, Radio Starmaker Fund, SiriusXM, Stingray Music/Galaxie, The Carlu, Shure Canada, Toronto radio station Indie88, SOCAN, and Re-Sound20. Past sponsors have included Rogers Communications and Scion. The ceremonies are video-streamed live on CBC Music.