AMA latest, and a Q&A with Larry Klein, the man behind the awards

The American Music Awards finalized its artist line-up Tuesday morning, adding to the show R&B singer Mary J. Blige, pop band the Jonas Brothers, rocker Lenny Kravitz, rapper-turned singer Queen Latifah,and country acts Rascal Flatts and Sugarland.

That brings the total number of AMA performers above the 15 mark, as Beyonce was also recently added.

Of the latest additions, Blige (pictured) is the most intriguing, as her new album, "Growing Pains," isn't due until mid-December.

Long-time producer Larry Klein is staying tight-lipped as to who will be opening the show, but teases that Sunday night's AMAs, which will air live from Los Angeles on ABC (except on the West Coast), will begin with a three-artist medley of sorts.

Those in the area can pick from a range of ticket options to attend the awards.

This year brings a host of changes to the AMAs. For the first time ever, winners in the fan-picked awards were chosen via Internet voting, and fans also were able to utilize the Web to decide which song new-wavers Duran Duran would perform.

Late last week, Extended Play spoke with Klein, a Dick Clark Productions veteran has worked on "American Bandstand" and "New Year's Rockin' Eve," among others, to try to get a sense of what viewers may expect on Sunday night, as well as the difficulty of staging a music awards show today.

Talk about putting on an award show in this climate. Music sales are down, and TV ratings aren’t what they used to be.

The challenge is that there are simply so many other choices nowadays. It’s not just television. There’s so many places for people to get entertainment, be it the Internet or whatever it may be. You don’t have a choice of four or five -- you have your choice of hundreds.

It’s like radio many years ago. You’d turn on one radio, and you’d hear pop, rock, R&B and whatever. Radio changed, and it became very narrow-cast. TV is going that way, and it’s becoming fragmented.

But that’s why I like the AMAs. We take those fragments and put them all in three-hour event and it makes all the sense in the world.

The AMA nominations are still based on sales and radio data, no?

It’s from Nielsen SoundScan and [trade publication] Radio & Records. One is sales and one is airplay.

If you follow those two things, how can you go wrong? Many years ago when I was producing ‘Bandstand,’ people would ask how we stayed so current, since we taped shows five weeks in advance.

All you have to do is listen to the radio and read the trades.

Well, to that end, if you look at sales, it seems like it’s becoming rare for the No. 1 album to sell more than 100,000 copies. And you’re seeing a lot of independent acts break into the top-10 and sell without significant radio play. Does that make you think the process may need to be amended?

 I look at everything possible, and discuss so many ideas you have no idea. People come to me with ideas, and I try to take into account everything that’s going on around me. I do try to work in some of the things I see happening around me.

This year you switched the voting process, allowing fans to vote via your Web site. How many turned up?

I know it was well-over 1 million people. I think that’s extraordinary. The AMAs were always a show that was voted upon by the public, but it was sampling that would go to record buyers. It wasn’t open up to the country. It was X-amount of record buyers.

Now we took that public vote and expanded it to anybody. I think that took us to the next the level. We’ve always touted how we’re voted upon by the public, but this year, how much more public can you get?

What was your take on the MTV VMAs this year, in which so many performances were Web-only, and staged in rooms outside the main venue?

I happen to have been lucky enough to produce the MTV awards a couple of times. MTV does things differently. It’s not right or wrong. It just fits for them. Everybody does their shows differently ...

I don’t like leaving our stage to go to performances. I like our performances to be on the stage in front of our audience. I don’t like leaving the room, but that’s our show. If I were doing the MTV awards, I might think that were cool idea.

Will the strike by the Writer’s Guild have an effect?

Not really. We wrote a lot of generic intros well before the strike deadline. So we were done with all that when the deadline it. That sort of helps me out because I can spend more time putting the show together. It’s nice when you don’t have to worry about the script.

(Photo courtesy WireImage)