The 54th Grammy Awards, the year’s biggest celebration of music and the artists who make it, was a night to remember this past Sunday, featuring outstanding performances by artists ranging from Jason Aldean and Kelly Clarkson, Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry to Adele, Jennifer Hudson and Nicki Minaj. Of course, Whitney Houston’s sudden death over the weekend cast a pall over the evening, with many artists paying tribute to a vocalist who, in my opinion, stakes a strong claim to being the greatest female singer of modern times (and to whose music, incidentally, I could listen for hours). Her beautiful voice shall live on.
The upcoming March edition of The Retailer is our annual Music & Sound Awards issue, in which we—much like the Grammy Awards does with music—pay tribute to the very finest the music products industry has to offer. Our cover story will feature comments from almost all of the manufacturer winners, and we will publish the complete list of honorees in both the manufacturer and dealer categories; photos will be interspersed throughout the pages, too. Even though fierce competition prevented any company from nabbing an awards count equal to Adele’s six Grammys, companies such as Fender and Shure on the manufacturer side, and Alto Music and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center on the dealer side, received multiple honors.
Whether one prefers the soaring love ballads that made Whitney Houston a legend or the hard-driving rock music that makes people want to move, the Grammys—and the Music & Sound Awards—reinforce just how special an industry we call our own.