Jay Z leads the field with nine nominations, followed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pharrell Williams, Kendrick Lamar and Justin Timberlake with seven each. Drake nabbed five noms.
The Grammys will be handed out live from Staples Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 26 and broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m.
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He proclaims himself more influential than the President. .
But Kanye West’s Yeezus tour woes continued when less than 4,500 fans reportedly turned up to watch his show at a 19,000 seat arena in Kansas on Tuesday.
The Stronger star was surely far from impressed with the turnout at the Kansas City Sprint Center, but he tried to placate the audience during an eight minute rant. CONTINUE READING
From Showbiz 411:
Lady Gaga‘s ARTPOP dropped 81% in sales for its second week and fell to number 7 from first place. The album sold 50,154 copies, down from first week of almost 260K. ARTPOP will be written about one day as a huge marketing failure, unique in every way. After a long, much ballyhooed build up the finished product simply fizzled.
Lady Gaga– Stefani Germanotta– will learn a lesson about hubris from this experience. Maybe. She directed the entire campaign, went against the advice of others, and wound up losing a ton of money ($25 million seems severe, but lots) for herself and for Universal Music.
This means ARTPOP has sold just 300,000 copies in two weeks. Where are all her fans and ‘monsters’? They certainly didn’t like what they heard. But as I said before, ARTPOP was a gigantic misfire. Gaga tried to shove the art world down the throats of the fans. They didn’t want it, and they were confused by it. What had they related to was Gaga as champion of the underdog, the gay kid, the bullied kid, etc. Jeff Koons was not in their realm.
The flop album may yet affect more things, like a tour. It will be interesting to see if she can sell tickets to concerts with music no one bought. The best solution is get back with producer RedOne, add some songs to an ARTPOP 2.0, and try and revive the CD. It’s been done. But Gaga will have to listen to someone other than herself.
PS Eminem retook the number 1 spot with his Marshall Mathers LP 2. He sold 127.000 copies, about two and a half times as many as Gaga.
Her new album, ARTPOP, was conceived as an exploration of what happens when high-brow art meets low-brow pop and if there’s really any difference between the two. It’s a theme broached in her previous albums—and touched on by Kanye West in his oil-painting-turned-music-video for Power—but with ARTPOP, Gaga is trying to position herself as the second coming of Andy Warhol. Pop artist Jeff Koons designed the album’s cover, which features a naked sculpture of Gaga cupping her breasts while giving birth to a shiny blue ball. It’s art that could be easily mistaken for a slapdash Photoshop (ADBE) job.
Considering Gaga’s massive following of “Little Monsters,” as her fans call themselves, and the fact that her last album, 2011’s Born This Way, sold over 1.1 million copies during its first week (with a boost from a 99¢ promotion on Amazon (AMZN)), ARTPOP could’ve been the year’s biggest hit. Interscope Records (VIV:FP) spent about $25 million promoting the album, culminating in an over-the-top “artRave” event at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard on the night of ARTPOP‘s Nov. 11 release. CONTINUE READING
On Saturday, it was revealed that Interscope, Lady Gaga’s label, has spent $25 million dollars to promote her flop album “ARTPOP,” which is set to sell around 250 thousand copies in its first week — that’s a 75 percent drop from the first week album sales of “Born This Way” only two years ago.
Some have compared the fate of “ARTPOP” to Michael Jackson’s “Invincible,” where $30 million was spent on the promotion for an album that didn’t even launch one solid hit single. But “ARTPOP” is really Lady Gaga’s “Glitter.”
So, how was the money spent? We talked to a music industry analyst (who wants to be referred to as ‘Jacob’ for this story), who has worked at both Warner Brothers and Arista over the past twenty years. He works closely with people from Interscope and told us that the past year has been a huge nightmare for Lady Gaga and Interscope.
“She originally was going to have the album ready by last Christmas. They made her re-record it. When her tour wasn’t selling, they invented a hip injury and told Gaga to go away for months so the public could be interested in her ‘comeback.’ After the lead single ‘Applause’ didn’t get such a great reception, they made her re-record the album again. I hear that they allegedly paid radio stations in order to put the song at the top of their playlists,” Jacob laughs. CONTINUE READING
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