Alessia Cara took home the prize for best new artist at the 2018 ceremony. After the usual thank-yous and acknowledgements, Cara broke with tradition and highlighted the "popularity contest" nature of a lot of awards to shed a light on the lesser-known artists who work just as hard and produce excellent music too:
"There are some incredible artists out there that are making incredible music that deserve to be acknowledged that don't always get acknowledged because of popularity contests or numbers games, and that's kind of unfortunate. I just want to encourage everyone to support real music and real artists because everyone deserves the same shot."