For the first time ever, the runaway favourite for the Mercury Prize has prevailed. It was a deserving in for The xx (even if the Wild Beasts album was better), but you can't help feeling the band are the recipients of the "anti-backlash" vote.

Following last year’s disaster with Speech Debelle (the lowest-selling Mercury winner ever), the once prestigious prize was in danger of being awarded on the basis of the artist’s biographical backstory rather than musical merit.

Everybody knows the favourite doesn't – and, indeed, given the prize's remit shouldn't – win. But the Mercury people were eager to have another Elbow: a winning act who would get a real sales and media profile push from the award. In that sense, The xx are the perfect choice. They are still a band on the cusp, still reek somewhat of the underground, and have the sort of accessible album that, with wider attention and exposure, will sell a lot more copies – and, in doing so, burnish Mercury's name as a "breaker of new acts". They wanted an à la modewinner, and they got one.

Now that we can dismiss the Mercury as the Brits lite, it’s time to turn our gaze to the totally unknown but fascinating PRS Foundation New Music Award, an annual bunfight that announces its winner next Thursday. If the Mercury used to be described as “the Booker Prize of the music world”, then the PRS Award can only be the Turner Prize of the music world.

The first thing you notice about the PRS is that, with a first prize of £50,000 (€60,750), it’s worth more to the winner than both the Mercury and the Turner. It’s open to absolutely anyone, and it positively rewards “total creative freedom across any music genre of artistic context”.

The PRS prides itself on “being more controversial than any other music award” in that, like the Turner in the art world, it generates “but is that really music?” type comments and the winning entry, we can be sure, won’t end up being displayed prominently in HMV shops and hitting the top 10 in the album charts.

With judges such as Paul Morley and Joanna MacGregor, the award is never going to be tainted by fashionable dictates or record company pressure. According to Morley, it is for “whoever comes up with the most intellectually, technically and creatively persuasive proposal for a post-Cagian conceptual piece of sound-art.

Here is the sort of speculative, post-classical, non-album-based imagining the Mercury does not cover. The Mercury loves the traditional album, and what it can still mean. The New Music award considers what lies beyond, which might be the future, and which is yet to be publicised.”

Scoot along to the PRS for Music Foundation’s website and look for “New Music Award”. There are short films made by the five shortlisted artists, in which they attempt to explain the why, where and how of their musical works.

The idea here is that while there may be five judges with one vote each, the collective public vote is also worth one vote. It’s a good idea in that in gets people involved and interested, yet the way the voting works, no public interest lobby can hijack the overall vote.

Former Pogue Jem Finer, who co-wrote Fairytale of New York, was the inaugural winner of the PRS award in 2005 for his Score for the Hole in the Groundwork, which was all to do with acoustics and sculptural design. In his acceptance speech, Finer was able to say: "It's a wonderful surprise to see gravity and water accepted as essential elements in a composition" – which sums up the bonkers/avant-garde (depending on how you view your art-music) appeal of the PRS.

Listening to this year’s five shortlisted acts, there’s a real sense of purity and integrity both to how they approach their work and how they then try to explain it. At the awards ceremony next week (which the music world usually disdainfully ignores), there probably won’t be any Lauren Lavernes or Jo Whileys running around with microphones, no live BBC feed and no frantic tweeting by the excitable media pack.

What there will be is truly independent, innovative and experimental musical work. Remember what that sounded like, Mercury Music Prize?

prsformusicfoundation.com