As an electro/hip-hop party band who sing in Chiac (an Acadian mix of French and English) about such topics as gender anxiety, smooth jazz and deck shoes, Radio Radio would seem to be aiming for a rather particular niche market. And yet, media across the country are debating the merits of their third album, Belmundo Regal. For this, they have the Polaris Prize to thank.

Now in its fifth year, the prize has become the most effective champion of the underdog in Canadian music. It wasn’t set up this way on purpose: its 200-member jury of music critics across the country is instructed to vote for albums based solely on their artistic merit. But most nominees (including Radio Radio, on this year’s shortlist) have been anything but household names.

The prize’s first winner, in 2006, set the tone: Final Fantasy’s He Poos Clouds is a hyperactively imaginative, classically influenced, wilfully obscure concept LP that references Dungeons & Dragons and The Legend of Zelda. In a sense it’s the ultimate music geek’s album -- or geek’s album tout court -- and many critics hailed its victory as evidence that the Juno Awards, a glorified popularity contest, finally had a credible counterpart.

Since then, the Polaris has been captured by: a collection of cabaret-tinged, soundtrack-esque indie-pop (Patrick Watson’s Close to Paradise), a hazy electric homage to the psychedelic ’60s (Caribou’s Andorra), and an ambitiously confrontational punk-prog opus by a group whose name has since become synonymous with “unprintable” (F--ked Up’s The Chemistry of Common Life).

Despite this variety, there’s no pleasing everyone. Some writers (among them jurors) have maintained that the prize is dominated by “indie rock” -- an accusation undermined both by the indeterminacy of that catch-all phrase and the list of winners above. In 2007, a professor of political philosophy in Quebec lodged a complaint with the Competition Bureau over the lack of francophone artists shortlisted nominees (his teacup tempest quickly subsided, and on this year’s list, Radio Radio are joined by Montreal’s Karkwa). Other writers have complained about the absence of popular albums on the shortlist -- recently, one writer at the Ottawa Citizen penned an irony-free rant about “the sloppy practices of an album award that could effectively ignore” Justin Bieber.

Leaving aside the jury’s indifference to the artistic triumph that is My World 2.0, one could argue that a little more variety wouldn’t hurt. After all, the U.K.’s Mercury Prize, which inspired the Polaris, regularly includes jazz and classical albums on its shortlist; neither genre has had a look-in to the Polaris except on the 40-album longlist. Polaris executive director and founder Steve Jordan acknowledges the need to encourage “current and potential jurors to go out of their comfort zone and expose themselves to something that they may have previously decided that they’re just not going to like.”

The jurors clearly know what they like -- this year’s nominees include five that were previously shortlisted: Besides past winners Caribou and Final Fantasy (now known by his birth name, Owen Pallett), there are Toronto’s Broken Social Scene (the one household name in the bunch), Montreal psych-rockers The Besnard Lakes, and London, Ont., rapper Shad. This repetition would be distressing if it weren’t that every act’s second nominated album is superior to their first. It’s not as if each artist’s progression can be ascribed to the prize itself, but the acknowledgement and credibility it provides can go a long way to helping musicians find the revenue streams (through grants, film/TV licences, touring audiences) they need to be able to get on with making music.

And then there’s the $20,000 Polaris cheque, which winners have put to unpredictable uses: Pallett donated much of his windfall to the Toronto music cooperative Blocks Recording Club; F--ked Up used it to fund an all-star Christmas charity single; Patrick Watson and his band were able to pay for a rental van they’d crashed in the snow while on tour in North Dakota.

Granted, $20,000 is lower than many a Jeopardy! payout, and the organizers are working to increase funding. It’s important for its integrity, however, that the Prize never become too glitzy. So far, it has succeeded: Jordan, once a music-industry exec, notes, “There was one instance where we had a lead sponsor who thought their logo was too large in one of our mock-ups. I was like, ‘Am I in a dream? Is this really happening?’ ”

As the Polaris grows in stature, it grows in reach: the likes of The New Yorker, NME and The Guardian have taken notice. And over the past five years, Jordan has noticed more prizes jumping on the Polaris bandwagon: “I’ve started to see the words ‘curate’ and ‘jury’ and ‘independent’ and that kind of language used in some other awards. But hey, imitation is flattering. And if it helps present music in a ‘more about music and less about sales’ kind of way, then that’s a good thing.”

• The 2010 Polaris Prize takes place on Monday at 8 p.m. at Toronto’s Masonic Temple, with a charity screening party for the public at The Drake Hotel at 7 p.m. The gala can be heard on SIRIUS Satellite Radio channel 86 and CBC Radio 3, and viewed on MuchMusic.com (with a broadcast on MuchMusic on Sept. 25 at 9 p.m.).