How Two Labels Control the American Music Awards

The American Music Awards will be broadcast live on ABC this Sunday. Like most media awards shows this is not really about which artists are more talented as it is about which artists have the best promotion. Interesting is which of the labels heavily push their artists for success at these awards shows and which do not. The nominations heavily favour hip-hop artists with Alica Keys leading the way with five nominations.

There are four major music labels and every single artist nominated for the American Music Awards belongs to one of them. They are Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, EMI, and Warner Music Group. These labels control the music industry, yet only two of them appear to control the AMA's. Of the 64 nominations (not counting soundtracks) 84% come from two of the labels, leaving only ten nominations to the other two major labels combined. Universal leads the way with 31 nominations between its artists, securing 48% of the nominations. Sony is second with 23 nominations (36%), while Warner and EMI both gained five nominations each.

Four of the five nominations that EMI earned were from the band Coldplay alone. Warner did slightly better with four different artists receiving nominations. Still this fails to compare with the 14 different artists nominated from Sony and the 20 by Universal Music Group.

In the seventeen live performances that will take place during the awards show the difference is even greater. 94% of the performers are from Sony or Universal, with each label getting eight. The lone exception is EMI's Coldplay. No Warner artists will perform at the event. Ten artists have been invited to perform despite not earning any nominations, of theses six are from Sony with the other four all from Universal.

Universal's dominance over the nominations is immense. They control 50% of the nominated artists, 48% of the nominations, and 47% of the event's live performances.

Apparently two of the labels think promoting their artists at the American Music Awards is far more important then the other two labels do. Up for question is if these trends will continue with the award winners. At this point the assumption would have to be that they will. Expect Sony BMG and Universal Music Group to win everything, with Coldplay once again being the single exception.