Blog Posts by Paul Grein

Grammy contenders Mumford & Sons, Carley Rae Jepsen and Frank OceanThe best place to start in predicting the Grammy nominees for Song of the Year is the likely Record of the Year candidates. (Record of the Year honors a particular recording of a song. Song of the Year, which is awarded to the songwriter, honors the song itself.)

This year, three likely Record of the Year finalists are also eligible for Song of the Year. They are Carly Rae Jepsen's smash "Call Me Maybe" (which she co-wrote with Tavish Crowe and Josh Ramsay), Frank Ocean's "Thinking Bout You" (which he co-wrote with Shea Taylor) and Mumford & Sons' "I Will Wait" (which the four band members co-wrote). Mumford & Sons was nominated for Song of the Year last year for "The Cave."

Two other likely Record of the Year finalists—Adele's "Set Fire To The Rain" and "Somebody That I Used To Know" by Gotye featuring Kimbra—inexplicably weren't entered for Song of the Year. That leaves two slots to be filled. There's no shortage of songs to fill them. A whopping 778 songs are on this year's

For the second year in a row, the year’s best-selling song is likely to walk off with the Grammy for Record of the Year. “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra is favored to take the prize, which was won last year by Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep.” “Somebody That I Used To Know,” a classy break-up song which carries echoes of Sting’s best work, topped the Hot 100 for eight weeks.

The Grammy nominations will be announced on a live TV special on Dec. 5. The one-hour show will be co-hosted by LL Cool J and Taylor Swift, whose “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has an outside shot at nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. The awards will be presented on Feb. 10.

The year’s second best-selling song, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” is also likely to be nominated for Record of the Year. The bubbly song is rather teen-oriented for the panel of Grammy insiders that determines the nominations in the top four categories, but the song was the

Less than a week after Blake Shelton walked off with three awards at the Country Music Assn. Awards (including Entertainer of the Year), his fellow judge on The Voice, Adam Levine, has something to crow about: Maroon 5's "One More Night" logs its eighth week at #1 on the Hot 100. It's the longest-running #1 hit of the year by an American artist.

Maroon 5 has had three blockbuster hits since the show debuted on NBC in April 2011: "Moves Like Jagger" (featuring fellow judge Christina Aguilera), "Payphone" (featuring Wiz Khalifa) and now "One More Night." The three songs have sold a combined total of 12,707,000 digital copies in the U.S.

It's just the first week of November, but there are five Christmas albums in the top 30 on The Billboard 200. Rod Stewart's Merry Christmas Baby debuts at #3, which is the highest ranking for a Christmas album so far this season. Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Dreams Of Fireflies (On A Christmas Night) debuts at #9, Lady Antebellum's On This Winter's Night drops from #9 to #15 in its second week, Scotty McCreery's Christmas With Scotty McCreery drops from #15 to #21 in its third week and Blake Shelton's Cheers, It's Christmas leaps from #45 to #28 in its fifth week.

By now, you've all heard that Taylor Swift's Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week, the highest first-week total since Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 copies in its first full week in 2002. It's hard to imagine now, but before Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard in 1991, sales tallies were rarely divulged (and when they were, by the record companies themselves, they were no doubt inflated).

All we had to go on was The Billboard 200 chart itself. Until 1991, it was rare for albums to debut at #1. Even the biggest artists had to climb through the ranks to reach #1. Artists earned bragging rights not by the number of albums they sold in the first week, but by reaching #1 faster than any other album that year.

I've gone back through the charts and determined the album that rose to #1 the fastest in every year from 1956, when the chart became a weekly feature in Billboard, to 1990, the last year before Nielsen SoundScan's arrival made sales tallies public information and #1 debuts commonplace.

Blake Shelton was the big winner at the 46th annual Country Music Assn. Awards. The 36-year old Oklahoma native won three awards: Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year and Song of the Year. He shared the latter prize with his wife Miranda Lambert, who won Female Vocalist of the Year for the third year in a row.

[Related: Miranda Lambert cries after Song of the Year win]

Shelton was an upset winner for Entertainer of the Year. He beat Taylor Swift, whose new album, Red, made headlines just yesterday for selling more copies in one week than any other album since 2002. Swift was vying to become the first woman to win Entertainer of the Year three times. That potential record-setting achievement was promoted three times during the three-hour telecast, a sign that she just might pull it off.

In accepting the award, Shelton said that winning Entertainer of the Year was never in his sights. "When I moved here, I had two goals, to someday have a gold record and to someday be a member of the Grand Ole Opry," he said. Shelton was presented the award by Reba McEntire, a fellow Oklahoman who won the prize in 1986.

It's a safe bet that Rascal Flatts and Martina McBride prefer the CMA Awards to the Grammys. Rascal Flatts won six consecutive CMA awards as Vocal Group of the Year, but has yet to win a Grammy. McBride has been named Female Vocalist of the Year at the CMAs four times, which puts her in a tie with Reba McEntire for the most awards in the category in the show's history. She, too, has yet to win a Grammy.

George Strait and Diamond Rio also probably prefer the CMAs to the Grammys. Strait has been named Male Vocalist of the Year at the CMAs five times, which puts him in a tie with Vince Gill for the most wins in the category in the show's history. But he has yet to win a Grammy in the equivalent category—Best Male Country Vocal Performance (now Best Country Solo Performance). (He did win a Grammy for Best Country Album for 2008's Troubadour.)

Diamond Rio has won four CMA Awards for Vocal Group of the Year, but has yet to win a Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. (The group did win a Grammy for Best Southern, Country, Or Bluegrass Gospel Album for 2010's The Reason).

Chris Brown's "Don't Wake Me Up" jumps to #10 on the Hot 100. It's Brown's second top 10 hit of the year, following "Turn Up The Music," which peaked at #10 in March. This marks the first time that Brown has had multiple top 10 hits in a calendar year since 2008, when he amassed four (counting a featured credit on Lil Mama's "Shawty Get Loose").

That, of course, was before Brown's career was put in serious peril by his assault on Rihanna on the eve of the Grammys in 2009. Brown didn't return to the top 10 until the spring of 2011, when he peaked at #6 with "Look At Me Now "(featuring Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes).

Why is Brown's career on the upswing? Some time has passed. Also, "Don't Wake Me Up" and "Turn Up The Music" are both first-rate pop records. They were so good they couldn't be denied. You could even make an argument that they'd both have charted higher than #10 if the incident had never happened. Brown's 2008 hits, after all, included two #2 hits ("With You" and "Forever") and a #3 ("No Air," a collabo with Jordin Sparks).