It's Grammy Time!
Jim Bessman, 04 January 2001
I guess the big music industry news in the first week of the year is always the Grammy Awards nominations, though there's very little I find less noteworthy than popularity contests. I'll just note here that reporters are picking up on the Recording Academy's boast that no single artist dominated this year-unlike Lauryn Hill and Santana the last two-and that this year's nominees, as pointed out in the Academy's press release, reflect "an eclectic year in music" and are "the most diverse group of artists and recordings the Academy has ever celebrated." For the record, multiple nominees (and 25 artists drew three or more nominations) included Dr. Dre, Destiny's Child, Eminem, Vince Gill, U2, Madonna, Steely Dan, Faith Hill, and 'N Sync. Any snoring you hear in the background is mine.
Now I am into the NARM Chairman's Award for Sustained Creative Achievement, which will go to Rod Stewart at the industry trade group's convention in March. Stewart and Elton John are two rock dinosaurs who actually do continue to put out consistently good product, no matter its lack of relevance in today's teen-dominated marketplace. I also salute the great Courtney Love, who has demanded that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame give back its collection of "mine or Kurt's clothes, guitars or debris that [the Hall] scavenged for" in protest over its failure to induct Lynyrd Skynyrd, Patti Smith, and AC/DC this year. Clearly, Paul Simon, Michael Jackson, and Steely Dan-who were elected--just don't cut it with Courtney.
MP3.com has reported that its holdings of free legal music on the Internet tripled over the last year, and now totals some 750,000 songs from 109,000 artists. An average of 1,300 new songs are added to the site daily. The company says that the stats show both the incredible growth rate of online music and the recognition by artists that the Internet can effectively get their music out to a worldwide audience.
The year's first Napster story, meanwhile, is positive. Edel Music AG has joined fellow German company Bertelsmann eCommerce Group in making its whole catalog available to the music-file sharing company. Napster, you'll recall, has teamed with Bertelsmann in forming a new Napster subscription service, to debut later this year. Unlike the giant Bertelsmann, however, edel is an indie label, and will now seek other indies as content providers for the new Napster--and will also help out in seeing that artists, labels, and publishers get their due royalty payments.
Back to the Grammy announcements, which always bring together the biggest crowd of journalists and publicists of the year. The importance of publicity in the music business will again be the focus of a six-week college course offered by the Journalism, Public Relations and Fundraising Department of UCLA. The "Publicity In the Music Industry" course features top professionals from the music, media, and Internet industries, and will explore the ever-increasing prominance of publicity campaigns in "creating and maintaining the right image and point-of-view" for an artist.
Why on earth this should be so, perhaps, will also be addressed. Illustrating another segment of the music industry that has also grown in unwarranted importance, a new executive position of president of film music has been jointly created by Universal Music Group and Universal Pictures. Filling the new post is Kathy Nelson, the former president of film music at Walt Disney Motion Picture Group. The position is believed to be the first at a major entertainment company to bridge the music and film divisions, and testifies to the sales significance of movie soundtracks and scores.
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