Dear Gossips,
During an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music this week, Adam Levine remarked that “there aren’t any bands anymore”.
“That’s the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands. There’s no bands any more, and I feel like they’re a dying breed. And so I kind of, in a weird way, as far as … I mean, there still are plenty of bands, and maybe they’re not in the limelight quite as much, or in the pop limelight, but I wish there could be more of those around.”
BTS, a band, has just been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year 2020, an annual award based on an “artist’s or group’s worldwide performance across digital and physical music formats during the year, from streams to vinyl, and covers their entire body of work”.
Here are the previous IFPI winners:
2019 – Taylor Swift
2018 – Drake
2017 – Ed Sheeran
2016 – Drake
2015 – Adele
2014 – Taylor Swift
2013 – One Direction
This means that BTS is the first non-western act to win and obviously the first act performing mostly not in English, and selling music not in English, to win.
Next: a Grammy?
The Grammys are happening next weekend, postponed from its original date in January. We should soon be getting more news about the event and the lineup of artists featured during the broadcast. And as shortsighted as the Recording Academy has been (still mad about The Weeknd), I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be trying to involve BTS in some way. BTS performed at the Grammys last year as part of Lil Nas X’s stage. It’s time though for them to have their own. Isn’t that what you would expect, at the very least, on “music’s biggest night” for the artists who outsold all other artists around the world last year?
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
