With Olivia Rodrigo seemingly a shoo-in for best new artist, how are labels approaching a category unlike any other?
"This has been the most magical year of my life,” Olivia Rodrigo said in September at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she was named best new artist. And given the kind of planets-aligning commercial and critical success she has neatly achieved in this calendar year, it’s probably not the last award of that name she’ll claim in the coming months.
for five nonconsecutive weeks. Her meteoric rise has drawn comparisons to that of Billie Eilish, who swept the Big Four awards at the 2020 ceremony — the first time since Christopher Cross in 1981, and perhaps the only other time in the past decade where the best new artist winner has been so predictable.that labels typically do not take the potential competition into consideration when deciding which artists to submit, since those decisions are made early in the year.