In an era without blockbusters, Grammy Awards look lost

    Yet the Grammys continue to operate as if big record companies can still manufacture hits with $5 million marketing campaigns funneled through commercial radio and MTV. In the good old days of record-industry prosperity, a few hundred executives decided what music would be heard and how often, and became all-controlling, all-powerful and all-rich in the process. Superstar artists and multimillion-selling albums were the coins of the realm. The Grammys  benefited by serving as coronations for artists such as Eric Clapton, Lauryn Hill, Celine Dion and Carlos Santana, much in the way the Academy Awards thrived in years when movies such as “Titanic” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” dominated the box office.

        But the blockbuster era is over. Radio and MTV have been rendered nearly obsolete as mediums for breaking music, and CD sales are nose-diving. Business was down 14 percent in 2007, and shows no signs of turning around in the first few weeks of ‘08. Last year, the best-selling album was Josh Groban’s pop-opera Christmas release, “Noel,” at 3.7 million, about one-third of top-sellers during the ‘90s such as Shania Twain’s “Come on Over,” Metallica’s “Metallica,” and Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.”  Other big sellers last year spun off from kids shows (“High School Musical 2,” “Hanna Montana 2: Meet Miley”) and “American Idol” (Daughtry, Carrie Underwood). And the Eagles had huge success by ignoring the major labels and going directly to their fan base by selling their album at Wal-Mart.

       A prime-time TV “event,” itself a product of a simpler era when there were only three major networks, needs big stars and big hits to thrive. And the Grammys are hurting in that department. Winehouse, one of the music industry’s few rising stars, is up for six Grammy nominations this year, but she hasn’t sold even 1 million albums --- for decades the platinum standard by which mainstream hits were measured.

    Yet just because there are no mega-stars on par with “Thriller”-era Michael Jackson doesn’t mean music has lost any of its cultural importance. On the contrary, more people are listening to more music than ever. A beehive of musical niches and subcultures has sprung up, built on free MP3 files, blogs, youtube videos and myspace-generated buzz. The year-end music polls of critics celebrate those niches. The 557 critics who voted in the annual Village Voice music poll and the 452 who voted in the Idolator.com poll both ranked LCD Soundystem’s “Sound of Silver” as the year’s best album, while the 648 bloggers compiled by the Hype Machine Web site had Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” at No. 1, with LCD Soundystem at No. 4.

       Radiohead can fill arenas around the world, and LCD Soundsystem is a successful club act. But they don’t have the kind of celebrity power the Grammys need to attract an audience big enough to satisfy advertisers. The Grammy programmers would be more likely to attract viewers if they could hire Paris Hilton to writhe under an LCD Soundsystem disco ball, or persuade Hanna Montana to lip-sync a Radiohead song. But that wouldn’t be dignified enough for the Grammys, which have always tried to split the difference between their stated aim of honoring “artistic excellence” and populist appeal. Unfortunately, dignity and mainstream success don’t often go together in an era where everything shows up on the Internet almost as soon as it happens.

    What’s more, a number of the year’s most successful or talked-about albums --- from Radiohead, the Eagles, Alicia Keys, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss --- weren’t even eligible for Grammy consideration because of the long lead time required for the recording academy to poll its members. Only albums released between Oct. 1, 2006, and Sept. 30, 2007, were eligible for consideration, which means four months will have elapsed and thousands more albums released by the time the Grammys are finally handed out. That’s an inexcusable amount of lag time in a culture where music is available to the public almost the instant it is recorded.

       Can the Grammys reinvent themselves? Possibly. But first the industry that the Grammys purport to serve must undergo radical change. The multinational corporations are still desperately looking for blockbusters to prop up their quarterly profit statements. But the best music is already reaching an audience that doesn’t need multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns or glittery awards shows to validate its tastes.

    greg@gregkot.com