Laura Mvula is steady at #1, with Lissie’s “Daughters” up a spot to #4 and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me” back into the top ten. Rihanna scores a third top-twenty single from ANTI as lead, Drake-featuring single “Work” moves 25-19, joining “Kiss It Better” and “Close To You.” Dua Lipa makes it a second week with a pair of big leaps for “Be The One” (#20) and “Last Dance” (#31), the latter just ahead of the second re-entry for Kelly Clarkson’s “Piece By Piece” and the week’s highest debut, “Love Me Like That” by The Knocks featuring Carly Rae Jepsen. Jepsen’s Fuller House theme rendition, “Everywhere You Look,” debuts as well, as do new selections by The 1975, Yuna featuring Usher, Tove Lo, Javier Colon, Kris Allen, Miike Snow, and Miguel.

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In recent years, nominees for the most prominent, cross-genre GRAMMY Awards have been announced on a primetime CBS special, with popular artists like Taylor Swift, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Miguel, Keith Urban, and Lorde turning the nomination ceremony into a live concert performance. For its upcoming 57th season, the GRAMMYs, likely in attempt to keep up with evolving digital trends, made an adjustment to that formula, adapting the CBS broadcast into a holiday-themed concert special called A Very GRAMMY Christmas with only one award announcement: the prestigious Album Of The Year. As for the rest of the other 82 categories recognized by the Recording Academy committee, they were rolled out throughout the day on daytime television and radio properties and by a number of artists’ Twitter accounts.

Beginning at 8:30 AM Eastern, Pharrell and Ed Sheeran visited the set of CBS This Morning, announcing the nominees for Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Country Album, Best Urban Contemporary Album, and general field category Record Of The Year. Shortly thereafter, Ryan Seacrest announced the nominees for Best Pop Solo Performance. After announcing a few awards themselves on the @TheGRAMMYs Twitter account, announcement duties were turned over to popular artists such as Alanis Morissette and Jared Leto, as well as media personalities including Mario Lopez and Entertainment Tonight‘s Nancy O’Dell, all using Twitter’s native video function. A flurry of tweets from nearly twenty-five different outlets followed through 2:00 PM Eastern, at which point all of the nominations excluding Album Of The Year were posted on GRAMMY.com, which previously occurred at the close of the primetime nomination special.

This social media-fueled campaign is another step toward modernizing the awards process for the Recording Academy, in a field now expanding with awards shows from big players like MTV, Billboard, YouTube, and iHeartRadio that have taken advantage of creative social media usage. As Maura Johnston pointed out in the Boston Globe, MTV previously used Snapchat to preview this year’s Video Music Awards nominees, while Billboard partnered with Tumblr to provide nearly-instant GIFs of the 2013 Billboard Music Awards. By utilizing the well-followed accounts of popular media figures, the GRAMMYs are able to spread the news of their nominees across a much wider audience than could have been available through solely their own media channels.

On the other hand, the inability to pre-determine where nomination announcements were coming from made the hours-long process a bit difficult to follow at times. The official GRAMMYs Twitter account dutifully retweeted each announcement after it was made on Twitter, but attempting to find each tweet amidst the regular buzz and reaction of the Twitter newsfeed added a lot of noise to the stream. With no roadmap or direction from the GRAMMYs account itself, those interested had to wait for their account to retweet each announcement, then parse the tweet and watch the video announcement to get a grasp of the artists and songs nominated. While this was a great first step, the campaign could have potentially been improved if @TheGRAMMYs had laid out a timetable of which accounts would be making announcements and in what order. Additionally, regular announcements of who was announcing the next category’s nominees could have added potential followers for the artists and media personalities involved, as those interested would flock to their accounts in wait of the next batch of nominees.

The 57th GRAMMY Awards air on February 8, 2015 on CBS. A full list of the nominees is available here excluding Album Of The Year, which will be announced at the conclusion of tonight’s A Very GRAMMY Christmas CBS special.

These are one hundred songs that stayed in my heavy rotation throughout 2013. In a year that saw personal advancements including eight weeks studying abroad in France and graduation from college, these songs soundtracked my year, each song appealing to me through instrumentation, lyrics, or just its overall mood. Read on for descriptions of each track, access the whole playlist on SoundCloud to listen, and judge away.
Continue reading “Kurt’s 100 Favorite Songs of 2013”

2012 has brought a lot of new music for me to discover and enjoy, from a multitude of genres and artists. This year marked a conscious shift in my tastes from typical teenage pop/rock to an expansion that included practically all genres, from folk and blues to hip-hop and R&B. There’s a whole lot of great music out there, and being open to all different types and artists has allowed me to discover many more gems than I have in previous years. This year alone, I listened to at least 100 new albums and EPs from veterans and beginners alike, finding many new artists to champion and new music to put on my ever-expanding playlists. Many of these new discoveries were rewarding, with some of my favorite releases of 2012 coming from artists who were completely unknown to me beforehand. This week, I’m sharing fifty of my favorite albums of the year, with the hope that you will find something new to discover and enjoy as well as the year comes to a close. The list kicks off today with albums #50 through #41.

Continue reading “Kurt’s Favorite Albums of 2012: #50–41”