Lady Gaga, Jason Aldean to perform at Grammy nomination concert
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Lady Gaga and Jason Aldean will anchor the concert/press conference hybrid that is the cumbersomely titled ‘The Grammy Nominations Concert Live!! -- Countdown to Music’s Biggest Night.’ The double-exclamation mark event is set for Nov. 30, and will air live on CBS at 10 p.m. EST from downtown’s Nokia Theatre. The event, in which nominations for the 2012 Grammy Awards will be unveiled, will be tape-delayed for West Coast viewers.
The concert is open to the public, and its fourth year has shifted back to Nokia Theatre after two years at the more cozy Club Nokia next door. Tickets, not including surcharges, range from $35 to $75, and VIP packages run up to $255, according to pricing details revealed by Ticketmaster. The general public on-sale is Friday at 10 a.m. PDT.
Lady Gaga and Aldean are no doubt in line for numerous Grammy nominations. Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ is one of the year’s most successful pop efforts, though it didn’t receive the critical praises of some of her prior work. To date, it has sold more than 1.8 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Aldean, meanwhile, released his ‘My Kinda Party’ in late 2010, but Grammy eligibility dates have it on this year’s ballot. So far, it’s sold just under 2 million copies.
The Recording Academy began broadcasting its nominations press conference in prime time as an experiment. Typically, award show tallies are unveiled in the early morning hours to maximize media coverage throughout the day. The Recording Academy aimed to turn the unveiling into something of an event to generate hype for the CBS broadcast of the ceremony early the following year.
Other award shows haven’t followed in the Recording Academy’s footsteps, and the nominations concert has thus far been received rather lukewarmly. Last year’s Grammy nomination concert drew 5 million total viewers, a 21% slide from 2009’s show. It was easily defeated by NBC’s ‘Law & Order: Los Angeles,’ which was No. 1 in the slot with 9.1 million total viewers.
Nevertheless, the actual 2011 awards drew an astounding number of viewers this February, and the nominations concert remains a vital hype-generating event. About 26.6 million people tuned into this year’s Grammy Awards, in which the Arcade Fire, Lady Antebellum and jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding scored surprise wins. That’s a 2.5% increase over 2010’s program and the largest audience since the 2000 show, which drew 27.8 million viewers. In the key 18-to-49 demographic, the program had its strongest ratings since 2004.
The 2012 Grammy Awards will be held Sunday, Feb. 12, and broadcast live on CBS at 8 p.m. EST. Unlike other major award shows, the Grammys are tape-delayed for West Coast viewers. Works recognized in 2012 must have been released between Oct. 1, 2010 and Sept. 30, 2011.
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-- Todd Martens
Photo: Lady Gaga at the 2011 Grammy Awards. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
