Rahman Wins Billboard… errr, Grammys

AR Rahman added to his stash of trophies this morning by picking up Grammy awards for both ‘Jai Ho’ (Best Song Written for a Motion Picture) and Slumdog Millionaire (Best Compilation Soundtrack). Good for him, although we can’t say his win wasn’t predictable. ‘Jai Ho’, after all, was the only tune in its category to crack the Top 40, and we suspect that this year, chart makers Billboard, who stopped holding their annual awards ceremony a couple of years ago, made a deal with the Recording Academy to do the job for them. Billboard would give out awards for the best-selling and highest-charting hits of the year, and expectedly Taylor Swift’s Fearless, the best-selling album of 2008-2009 (the Grammy Awards covered releases between September ’08-August ’09) won Best Album, and Best New Artist went to the Zac Brown Band, who had the best-selling album of all the acts in their category (which coincidentally was the only one of the big four with mostly indie acts).

However, not all the year’s big sellers were big winners. The members of the Recording Academy are older, much older, than the average American music buyer. They tend to be rock, country or jazz fans, and going by what has dominated the charts recently, we’d say most songs are downloaded by 14-year-old girls. As a result, there were a couple of exceptions to this Best Selling Album=Best Album rule, most notably Kings Of Leon’s ‘Use Somebody’ winning Record of the Year over two four-million-selling singles, ‘I Gotta Feeling’ by Black Eyed Peas and ‘Poker Face’ by Lady GaGa. The Academy’s age worked in Rahman’s favour as well, for Slumdog beat out the arguably better Twilight soundtrack.

AR Rahman’s been on a roll. We’ve been following his success.