Thursday, October 30, 2014

[hwlxhokf] Grammy awards

Some thoughts on possibly modifying the criteria for the Grammy awards.

"Best record" should reward production value, making the song sound good where it otherwise could have sounded bad.  Not all artists have access to good production.  Could the song have sounded better if more money were available?  However, at the very top, this may be a difficult category to judge, because production becomes pretty much perfect.  There remains the tricky problem of how to judge crappy songs with good production.

"Best song" is a prediction of future derived works, in a loose sense, how influential a song will be in inspiring future artists to incorporate the good ideas of this song into their songs.  Obviously lyrics or melody in covers, but also more subtle things like musical style.  It could even award production techniques.  Perhaps "best song" should be rewarded after significant delay, like the Nobel prize, when "influence" can be better measured.  There remains a tricky problem of separating who first introduced something versus who developed it into something many others recognized as a good idea, the latter having the problem of bias due to the artist's popularity.

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