The 50th Anniversary LABBS Quartet Contest is a mess

The LABBS 2026 Quartet Prelims took place last weekend, and there was certainly lots to celebrate. In particular I want to congratulate my friends in Noteworthy, who I've been working with as a coach for a few years, and who achieved another personal best of 70.4% and became the most improved women's quartet for the third year in a row! Those guys are unstoppable.

However, for Noteworthy and many others, the whole event was severely tarnished by a revised qualification system which seemed to make absolutely nobody happy.

Disclosure: I served on the BABS Board of Trustees from 2019 to 2025. I'm a BABS Member through my male quartet. I am also a LABBS Member through my role as Musical Director at Main Street Sound, and as a singer in a mixed quartet.

Background

LABBS Quartet Prelims has always been about female quartets attempting to qualify for the semi-finals at Convention. In order to do that, quartets must be placed in the top 16 at Prelims. Over the years the format has been adjusted to include educational aspects and opportunities for coaching and feedback, but the primary goal is to hold the qualifying contest.

In 2023, LABBS volunteered to make their events the permanent home for mixed-voice quartets in the UK. Before then, mixed quartets had lived a somewhat nomadic existence, with the contest being shared between the 3 UK barbershop organisations. As a result, mixed quartets had no consistency over the timing of their contests, they had no prelims round or even a semi-final, and generally considered themselves underserved.

LABBS proposed and implemented a plan which saw mixed quartets compete first at Quartet Prelims, in order to qualify for semi-finals and ultimately finals, just like LABBS women's quartets and BABS quartets.

To be clear, giving the mixed quartets a permanent home at LABBS was a major step in the right direction. But the journey wasn't without its speed bumps. In that first year, LABBS made just 6 places available to mixed quartets in the semi-finals, versus the usual 16 places for women's groups. And of those 6, only the top 3 would sing in the finals, as opposed to 8 women's finalists. At the time, as it happens, this actually meant that a higher percentage of mixed quartets went through than women's, as only 7 mixed quartets entered prelims. So I guess you could reasonably argue that the number of spots reflected the relative popularity of mixed vs. female quartet singing in LABBS at the time.

The number of spots (6 semi-finalists and 3 finalists) persisted until 2025, at which time it became clear that the mixed quartets were increasingly unhappy about the situation. It was felt that, if mixed quartet singing was to become truly equitable, it should compete on exactly the same terms as men's and women's groups.

In my view, this would amount to the following:

(As an aside, I feel that BABS has done this successfully by exactly duplicating the awards given to mixed and male choruses in their contests. They award two sets of medals, two most-improved awards, two sets of Divisional awards, and two Small Chorus awards. The highest-scoring chorus from across both contests gets the one automatic BHS qualification spot available for BABS to award.)

How LABBS dealt with the problem

LABBS correctly identified the problem here, and set about creating a new system intended improve equity between female and mixed quartets. Regrettably, the solution which LABBS landed on does so by sacrificing opportunities for female quartets.

Here's the new system proposed by LABBS just before entries opened for Prelims this year:

  1. At prelims, female and mixed quartets would compete against each other for 22 total spots in the semi-finals
  2. In the semi-finals, female and mixed quartets would compete against each other again for 11(?) total spots in the finals (I actually can't find the number of finals spots anywhere on the LABBS website, so 11 is a guess based on the previous number of 8 female plus 3 mixed)
  3. In the finals, the contests would effectively split, and separate medals would be awarded for the top 3 Mixed and top 3 Women's quartets

Additionally, the Mixed Quartets are now eligible for the awards previously only given to female quartets (Most Improved, Novice Quartet etc).

Anyone reading this with any understanding of barbershop contests will instantly spot several problems.

How did we get here?

Part of me can almost understand how LABBS landed on this system. They wanted to improve equity between mixed and female quartets, but they have a number of constraints. Primarily, this is about time — at convention, the semi-finals and finals take place on the same day. Having 32 quartets in the semi-finals and 16 in the finals would mean about 8 hours of stage time are required just for contestants, plus additional time for breaks, mic-testers, swan songs, and announcements.

By comparison, this year's system amounts to about 5h 30m of contestant stage time; 3h 40m for the semi-finals, and 1h 50m for the finals.

I have been given to understand that the system was devised in part by the LABBS judging team, which has a strong incentive to reduce the amount of time they have to sit in the pit. (To be clear, I'm not saying that's the explicit reason the decisions were made, but incentives are often instructive when trying to understand a thought process.)

However, scoring for 8 hours is not unheard of in a British barbershop contest. At the BABS 40th Anniversary convention in 2014, the judges scored 46 choruses in one contest round which, given 12 minutes per chorus contestant, would have taken a whopping 9h 12m, plus added time for extras. (Chorus contestants are generally given 12 minutes to account for the time needed to get on and off stage.)

Bluntly, if LABBS didn't have the capacity or willingness to host the mixed quartets in a proper contest on the same basis as the women's contest, why did they volunteer to host the mixed contest in the first place? This was at best a lack of foresight, given the inevitability that one day the mixed quartets would want to be treated equitably.

Are there invisible constraints of which I am not aware? Maybe! But if that's the case, the reasons for those trade-offs should be communicated better. Are LABBS operating within a real set of constraints only some of which we know about, or do they genuinely believe that they've created the best possible version of this contest system?

The impact

I'm writing this the week after Quartet Prelims, so we know the outcome of the first round: 12 female quartets and 10 mixed quartets will sing in the semi-finals. That will make this the smallest female semi-final most of us have ever experienced in LABBS. And it's particularly rubbish given that this is LABBS's 50th Anniversary Convention, at which they should be celebrating their rich and vibrant history and culture of female quartet singing.

Additionally, the effective qualifying score for a female quartet has meaningfully risen. In 2025, a female quartet needed a 68.5% to qualify. This year, the lowest-scoring female quartet to qualify scored a 71.5% — a full 3 p.p. higher than last year. LABBS has justified this by saying that the higher effective qualifying score reflects the "level of excellence" required to sing at convention. That must be pretty hard to hear for groups who scored between 68.5-71.5% — last year they were excellent; this year they aren't.

Another effect has been the almost complete sidelining of female quartets in the Prelims awards. Of the 4 awards given (Most Improved, Novice Quartet, Youth Quartet, and Senior Quartet), only one winner was a female quartet. Counting up the top 3 for each award, you get 7 mixed quartets and 3 female quartets.

Going back to the start of this post — Noteworthy were the most improved female quartet for the 3rd year in a row. But for the first time, they had to work this out for themselves by studying the scoresheets, because all of the top 3 Most Improved quartets were mixed.

There is absolutely no reason why — given separate medals will be awarded in the finals — these awards couldn't be duplicated across mixed and female contests. It's either a fully open, non-gendered contest, or it isn't.

The huge Open Contest irony

LABBS is effectively 75% of the way towards creating a fully open quartet contest by the back door, even if it's one which excludes male-only quartets and awards separate medals to female and mixed quartets. Besides those two things, everything about this system is what one would expect from an open contest.

To be completely clear, I believe that open contests are the only possible long-term future for barbershop in the UK. But if we're going to do them, let's do them properly and with the involvement and investment of the whole British barbershop community. BABS has been trying — unsuccessfully — to convince LABBS to collaborate on an open contest for years, and LABBS has spent the whole time saying that they can't do that (yet?) because it's not what their members want. And yet, in 2026, we are 75% of the way towards the LABBS quartet contest being open, with zero member consultation and no discussion with external partners and stakeholders.

At risk of re-opening an old wound, it's worth pointing out that when BABS announced (and quickly rolled back) that the 50th Anniversary BABS Convention would be a special one-off open contest, LABBS, justifiably, were straight out of the gate to publicly criticise BABS for not consulting LABBS or their own members, and for only giving the community 6 months' notice of the change.

LABBS also managed to create an almost-open contest without any of the benefits you would expect from an open contest. The system is still exclusionary just as before, because singers are put in boxes based on their sex, and the medals are awarded based on those boxes. And the change has been zero-sum; one group has been disadvantaged in order to advantage another, rather than both being lifted to the same level.

It may appear hypocritical for me to complain that female quartets are being sidelined on the one hand, then call for a fully open contest on the other. But we have the worst of both worlds here, any nobody was asked what they thought about it.

I have found this very hard to write, because I want to be supportive of all the organisations who work hard for us constantly to create what is generally an extremely enjoyable, inclusive, and open community in which to conduct contests. It's also hard because I feel like I'm risking the reputation and standing of the LABBS chorus I direct, and the quartets I sing with, in order to make this point.

But on this, I do feel strongly that LABBS screwed up. The only solution to the problem which LABBS correctly identified was to leave the female quartets as they were, but to just increase the number of mixed-voice qualifiers in each round to match. Would that have made the judges unhappy? Possibly. But the judging team is there to serve the community, and they should be taking decisions in the best interests of contestants. I don't think they succeeded in that this time.

This whole mess has, frankly, only served to convince me further that the only way to create a fair and equitable contest structure for British barbershop is to have one, unified organisation and a fully open, BHS-style contest. But that, regrettably, feels a very long way away.

I'm not on Facebook or other social media so I've missed the discussion that's taken place on there. It's possible that I'm missing important context.

If any of the facts I've set out in this post are incorrect, please email me and I will make a correction. I'd also welcome thoughts and responses. You can email pb@ptrbrynt.com.