There's a New Awards Show on The Block

It seems like there's an awards show for everything these days. From the People Magazine Awards to giant surfboards presented for whatever teens are into, if you can scrounge up a statuette and some screentime, stars will show up for it. The first ever iHeartRadio Awards will hit the television airwaves tonight, but what is this is new upstart all about? Sure you've heard that American Idol 's Ryan Seacrest will be hosting on the red carpet, but the newborn event has deeper roots than meet the eye.

Radio listeners will recall iHeartRadio as a music aggregator app in its infancy, (circa 2008 for those early adopters under the moniker iheartmusic.com). This apparent indie effort is no small potato; it's owned by media monolith Clear Channel. A Spotify-style streaming application was released around the same year as the aggregator, and has since ballooned into an empire with franchises such as a branded music festival and mega-station powering the music channels of outlets such as CBS Radio and Yahoo! Music Radio.

Seacrest is not only a red carpet host; his Ryan Seacrest productions is also producing the television event. Readers will recall that Seacrest Productions is also responsible for such guilty pleasure entertainments as Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Shahs of Sunset. In true Seacrest property fashion, iHeartRadio's ceremony makes no pretentions regarding critical acclaim or artistry. It's a festival celebrating pop in its most mainstream form. Basically, if you heart it, they've got it, (and have an artist specific hashtag for it). This is the one night where you don't have to be shy to tweet #iHeartSelena or #iHeartBeiber, (if you're still in his camp for whatever reason. Just kidding, you should be a little shy about that one). Let's just say this is not the show that will have a bunch of confused teens tweeting about Arcade Fire the morning after. This is the award ceremony the internet generation built, with categories touting viewers to vote for their celebrity Instagram BFF right on the event's homepage.

What will the inaugural iHeartRadio awards actually look like? We can't be sure until it airs, but all we know is we're waiting with bated breath to see if Ri-Ri will flash her newly Instagram-censored boobs on the boob tube a la Lil Kim at the VMAs. It all goes down at 8 PM ET on NBC.

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