He’s just received another seven Aotearoa Music Award nominations, but Marlon Williams only needs the Taite to complete a STAG – one of the hardest, rarest and least known achievements in New Zealand music.

Marlon Williams and 30 Rock may not be the most obvious pairing, but Williams has the chance to be the latest four-letter acronym holder in New Zealand music. And we’ve got 30 Rock to thank for getting everyone onboard with four-letter awards acronyms.

It all started with audacious bling. The year was 2009 and the best and funniest thing on TV was 30 Rock, an absurd and incisive parody of the television industry. Tracy Jordan, the unreliable star of the show-within-a-show, goes gift shopping for his wife. Instead, he buys himself a secondhand, diamond encrusted necklace bearing the acronym “EGOT”.

The joke was that the phrase (and the subsequent gold necklace) belonged to faded TV actor Philip Michael Thomas (real life Wikipedia bio: “After his success in Miami Vice, he appeared in numerous made-for-TV movies and advertisements for telephone psychic services.”). It paraphrased his ultimate quest: to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award.

The joke was also true. Thomas had indeed coined “EGOT” in 1984. He had a necklace, too. But 30 Rock’s gag thrust the four forgotten letters into the mainstream. The grand slam of popular entertainment was reborn as meme.

You can tell it caught on because the ultimate act of fandom is to create lists. And there are so many EGOT lists now. The first EGOT was completed when composer Richard Rodgers won an Emmy in 1962. Most recently, Steven Spielberg joined the pantheon with this year’s Grammy for Best Music Film, 35 years after winning two Oscars for Schindler’s List. One guy, songwriter Robert Lopez, has done the whole thing twice. 

There are somewhere between 15 and 30 EGOTs, depending how you count them, and it is a coveted symbol of range. A big part of the fun is arguing whether to count honorary awards like Lifetime Achievement, or if a Daytime Emmy is good enough.

One thing we know for sure is that four-award acronyms are good and cool, and that we definitely need more of them. As it happens, the 2026 Taite Music Award season is the perfect time for our entire nation to get excited about the EGOT of New Zealand music, the STAG:

• A Silver Scroll, APRA’s annual songwriting award.
• A Taite Music Award, given yearly by Independent Music NZ to recognise an album’s creativity and excellence.
• Any Aotearoa Music Award (the AMAs, formerly the New Zealand Music Awards, formerly the Tuis, formerly the RATAs, originally the Loxene Golden Disc).
• A single or album with enough sales and/or streams to be certified Gold by Recorded Music NZ. Admittedly, Platinum certification is twice as impressive as Gold, but no-one wants to win PATS.

We all ought to be excited about STAGs thanks to Marlon Williams. He’s already got two Silver Scrolls, half a dozen Aotearoa Music Awards (plus seven nominations this year), and two Gold records. For eight years all he’s needed is a Taite Music Prize. He’s been a finalist three times already, and he’s in the mix again this year. 

Williams first made the shortlist in 2016 when the Taite went to Silicon, aka Kody Neilson. The previous year Neilson had shared the Silver Scroll with his brother, Ruban, for writing ‘Multi-Love’ by UMO. As the Mint Chicks, the brothers also won 5 AMAs in 2007 for Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! That album was a bit of a slow burner and took until 2018 to go Gold. 

When Marlon Williams missed out on the 2019 Taite Music Prize, it went to Avantdale Bowling Club. They were led by Tom Scott. Scott’s first group, Home Brew, had already nabbed a 2012 AMA and gone Gold in 2013. This year, Scott is a finalist again and has extended his Taite record to seven finals. Even so, he remains a highly decorated _TAG, having never even been nominated for the Silver Scroll. 

Like the Taite, the Silver Scroll is a single, annual award. They are the two rarest achievements for STAG hunters. Get them both in the trophy cabinet and the rest ought to take care of itself, right? Not so fast. Let’s look at 2023.

The 14th Taite Music Prize was won by Princess Chelsea over no fewer than four holders of the Silver Scroll, including Marlon Williams. Not that she denied four potential STAGs. Neither The Beths nor Tami Neilson have a Gold record (yet). Aldous Harding does, for her single ‘The Barrel’, but despite a few nominations there’s no AMA on her CV. Only Marlon Williams had the chance to walk away as a STAG. It didn’t happen. 

Now it’s 2026, and Williams has his fourth shot at a Taite. This time around he’s the only Silver Scroller on the shortlist. The only S_AG among the finalists. The single chance.

The certified STAGs

If Marlon Williams completes the STAG, he’ll be joining an exclusive club. Thanks to Wikipedia, much searching of RadioScope, and various news archives, I can officially report that there are a grand total of four STAGs. Maybe five.

The major limiting factor is the Taite Music Prize, which didn’t exist before the inaugural award went to Lawrence Arabia in 2010 (he’s still a STA_ today). This is a serious blow to a number of S_AGs. Think of longstanding legends with names like Dobbyn, Finn, Runga and McGlashan. Instead our first STAG was a teenager who cleaned the whole thing up in about 400 days. 

The OG STAG was, of course, Lorde. ‘Royals’ went Gold almost instantly in March 2013 and won the Silver Scroll that October. In November she grabbed an armful of AMAs. By the time the Taite ceremony rolled around in April 2014, she had the good grace to ask that her $10,000 and other prizes be shared among the other finalists. They probably hadn’t bothered to prepare speeches.

Remember how Kody Neilson shared a bunch of AMAs and a Silver Scroll with his brother, Ruban? Ruben had beaten him to the Taite with UMO’s first, Kody-free album in 2012. So in 2018 the Mint Chicks’ eventual Gold record actually minted two STAGs with the same surname and different Ts.

Troy Kingi became a STAG in 2021, but you can argue over exactly when. The last piece might have been that year’s Silver Scroll, which he won for ‘All Your Ships Have Sailed’. He already owned the 2020 Taite Music Prize, and he’d started picking up AMAs in 2018. The question is whether to count the 2015 Gold certification given to ‘Aotearoa’, by Stan Walker feat. Ria Hall, Troy Kingi And Maisey Rika. Is “feat.” enough? If not it was only a few months later, in December, that Kingi’s True Love earned its own Gold star and the STAG was confirmed.

Now we get to a more contestable claim. The Taite Music Prize may only date back to 2010, but the Independent Music NZ Classic Record award is handed out at the same ceremony. Consider it a backdated equivalent of the Taite. Since half the fun of the EGOT is arguing about Daytime Emmys and honorary Oscars, it only makes sense to throw the IMNZ Classic Album into the STAG mix and see how annoyed people get.

That would make Shona Laing the fifth and final STAG. In 1973 her single ‘1905’ went Gold and she won three AMAs, which were called RATAs at the time. Fourteen years later ‘Soviet Snow’ earned the 1988 Silver Scroll. That song was from South, which became an IMNZ Classic Album in 2020. Like some sort of anti-Lorde, Laing’s slog to STAG status took 47 years.

Perhaps Marlon Williams’ wait – 13 years and counting, but maybe not for much longer – isn’t so bad after all.  

The winner of the 2026 Taite Music Prize, and possibly also a STAG, will be announced on April 29. EGOT originator Philip Michael Thomas is still waiting to be nominated for any of its four constituent awards.