Beyonce and TS? They must mean most sold...which does not mean the best.
picking the best artist or piece or art in any industry is always gonna be subjective. You're always gonna have people disagree no matter who you pick. I'm pretty sure if us told you who YOU thought should win people would still flock in here like " Yea right, No Way, get outta here with that". All Itunes can go by is commercial impact which looks like they did. I'm not a HUGE fan of either artist but they both had huge years and very successful projects.
Yep.
I still don't understand the deal with Beyonce.
I think she is a fabulous artist, but I don't think I heard one second of any of her new songs and she is best artist?
Where is she played? The iTunes offices exclusively?
I would say it is out of my demo but I hear Taylor Swift's music every 5 seconds.
I'm not some huge Beyonce fan but she had a pretty big album this year that made a really big impact. At least i comparison to the rest of music this year. I mean she made CNN headlines with that release. I dont know what radio stations you listen to but she definitely had at least a couple songs getting decent rotation.
So Beyoncé wins best artist, but not best album? She only released one album
Nice logic
I've always seen sub categories like that as a way of giving credit to another great artist that year who deserved it. Otherwise it would be boring because by default anyone who won the most general overall award should automatically win almost everything else they're running for. It's like at Award shows when the person who wins best album of the year doesn't automatically take all the other categories. It's good to give credit to other artists who had just as good a year or maybe considerably better when you look at it from different perspectives.
At the same time you could have one artist who made a bigger impact in certain areas like radio, youtube, innovation and so forth that made their impact a little more visible but you can have another artist who had a more cohesive album that maybe didn't have the same visible impact but sold just as much.
wasn't that 'secret album' from this year..? it made a splash - had a full video for every song - i think it excited a lot of people from what i remember. but in essence, i don't really 'get' her impact on music (as opposed to pop culture). her recognizable stuff was all from years ago, and her 'fierce' diva ramblings-on-wax don't mesh well with the giggly/dorky persona we've all seen now in clips and interviews. she's a caricature of 70s divas wrapped up in the contemporary notion of 'being iconic' rather than making great records.
edit: wait - i kinda misread these comments, i thought she HAD won 'best album' not 'best artist' - so my comment is kinda moot. she can do all this weird Iconic Diva stuff as an artist - has nothing to do with her music as far as a category goes. i'm clearly just rambling now on a midday monday......
Her biggest hits were from years ago but she still had big music this year especially in comparison to the lackluster performance of the rest of music commercially this year. It just wasn't a great year for music overall. So I can see the logic behind it.
and most importantly for Itunes. She released the album secretly, no promotion, and exclusively on Itunes a week or two early and it did huge numbers which helped in Itunes favor greatly showing that you could release a project that way online exclusively and still be one of the biggest successes of the year. That was definitely a good look for Itunes. It was a huge story too. It made CNN, sharing that good publicity with Itunes.
