"The Stig Anderson Music Prize Fund of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music" was endowed for the purpose of awarding, annually if possible, The Polar Music Prize to one or more persons. The actual prize money depends on the earnings of the fund, but the assets have been invested in such a way that, barring accidents, there should be between MSEK 1,5 and 2 available for annual distribution.

The donor's breadth of musical vision, characterised by an insistence that it is not only "good" music in the convetional sense which deserves to be rearded, because "good" music can mean such a wide variety of things, is reflected by the statues of the foundation. Without any restrictions of naionality, the prize is to "awarded for significant achievements in music and/or musical activity, or for achievements which are found to be of great potential importance for music or musical activity, and it shall be referable to all fields within or closely connected with music".

The first award, in 1992, when an extra large sum of money was available for distribution because the fund had been accumulating during the build-up phase, clearly manifested the wide scope of the prize, with one award going to ex-Beatle Paul McCartney - who received MSEK 1, of which he immediately donated part to a hospital, while using the other to help in the setting up of a Performing Arts School in his native Liverpool - for his achievements in popular music - the field in which Stig Anderson himself had achieved the successes enabling him to endow the prize in the first place - and at the same time each of the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania received MSEK 1 towards the establishment of a performing rights organisation corresponding to STIM in Sweden.

Nomination rights are vested in the members of two large international performing rights organisations: CISAC (Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d´Auteurs et Compositeurs), to which the Swedish STIM is affiliated, and the corresponding organisation for the gramophone industry; IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

Nominations are handled by a prize committee - not a jury - which is also entitled to nominate candidates of its own. This committee includes representative from SKAP (the Swedish Society of Popular Music Composers), STIM (the Swedish Performing Rights Society), FST (the Society of Swedish Composers) and SMFF (the Swedish Music Pulishers Association.

The intention is for The Polar Music Prize to be presented annually on 18th May, when the name of the day is Erik. That days has been chosen, not because the donor happens to be called Stig Erik, but in honour of St Erik, the patron saint of Stockholm. And anyone who has visited the Swedish capital on a beautiful day in May - for example, the kind of day when the Polar Music Prize was presented for the first time, in 1992 - will know that on such a day life is even more worth living than usual. The day , then, has been chosen in the hope that the elements will favour us with a memorable setting for our festivities.