Who is the Entertainer of the Year?
- Sara Pierson
- Mar 3, 2021
- 4 min read
As many of you are around this time of year I was very excited to see the nominations for the Academy of Country Music Awards that will be airing in April of this year. Usually, I am pretty disappointed with the nominations as for the bigger categories they lack diversity not only in gender but in the artists themselves. It seems as though every year is the same five guys that are nominated for Entertainer of the Year and this year is no different. Per usual Luke Bryan has been nominated again, along with Eric Church, Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett, and Chris Stapleton. Today, I wanted to talk about these boys and who I think will win Entertainer of the Year.
Luke Bryan
So I crunched the numbers and I think I have the most accurate results I can achieve with the sources I could find on the internet. I decided a point system would work best to assess their actual credibility in this category. I went to the ACM website to look at the criteria for the Entertainer of the Year category and the basic points were as follows, (however not limited to):
Radio Succes
Music Video Success
Vocal Performance
Ticket Sales (I axed this as 2020 wasn’t exactly a good year for ticket sales)
Artist Merit
Appearances on Television
Songwriting
Digital Media Success
Contributions to the Country Music Industry
Now the system I came up with was to rank each artist on a scale from one to five (1 being the worst and 5 being the best) on each of the listed criteria. With a maximum of forty points allowed to each artist. Spoiler alert no one reached forty points. Not even close actually. This took me a few hours and many sheets of paper to put together but for you, I will make it fairly straightforward as far as the numbers go. So let’s jump right in!
Eric Church
Radio Success
Radio success seemed like an easy area to gauge as it is based on numbers naturally. So the results are pretty clean cut. I averaged out the radio plays over a twelve-month period to find the most played artist. Here is my ranking out of five based on my findings.
Luke Bryan - 4
Eric Church - 2
Luke Combs - 5
Thomas Rhett - 3
Chris Stapleton - 1
Music Video Success
In this category, I compared the number of views on each artist’s various music videos on Youtube. This list is not the most concrete due to the varying number of videos that were posted in 2020. However, I do think that the numbers I found reflected the artist’s actual success pretty well.
Luke Bryan - 4
Eric Church - 1
Luke Combs - 3
Thomas Rhett - 5
Chris Stapleton - 2
Vocal Performance
This area was my personal favorite as it is my area of expertise. I based the results of this category solely on my education of proper singing technique and overall enjoyment of the quality of singing.
Luke Combs
Luke Bryan - 1
Eric Church - 4
Luke Combs - 2
Thomas Rhett - 3
Chris Stapleton - 5
Artist Merit
Artist Merit is just as subjective as vocal performance so my decision on this was based again on my own personal opinion and the general popularity of the artist based on their following.
Luke Bryan - 2
Eric Church - 3
Luke Combs - 4
Thomas Rhett - 1
Chris Stapleton - 5
TV Appearances
Pretty straightforward. Based on the number of times they appeared on television. This included interviews as well as performances on tv in 2020. (Sorry Luke but I didn’t count American Idol)
Luke Bryan - 4
Eric Church - 1
Luke Combs - 2
Thomas Rhett - 5
Chris Stapleton - 3
Songwriting
Nowadays most songs are co-written with one or oftentimes more than one songwriter which makes it tough to gauge the artist’s songwriting ability. I judged this category based on how many songwriters were accredited and the quality of the songs they were credited with.
Thomas Rhett
Luke Bryan - 1
Eric Church - 4
Luke Combs - 3
Thomas Rhett - 2
Chris Stapleton - 5
Digital Media Success
This category came down to the average number of followers each artist had on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify. I figured that for each service there would be multiple followers that were duplicates. So the results are as follows,
Luke Bryan - 5
Eric Church - 2
Luke Combs - 3
Thomas Rhett - 4
Chris Stapleton - 1
Contributions to the Country Music Industry
This last category is the most important as it is what we actually heard from these artists in 2020. It was an important year to put out new music for every artist in the music industry due to COVID interfering with ticket sales and the touring schedules. There were two different avenues for each of these
artists to go. One route was to release new music soon after the shutdown. The other is to write a really great LP or EP and record it during quarantine and release it at the end of 2020 or early in 2021. When it comes to the submissions for the ACM Awards they are due in December and as you know they are announced in February. This means any releases after the December cut-off can’t be considered when choosing the nominees. For this, I strictly looked at all releases of 2020 from each artist and judged their contributions based on length (LP or EP) and quality as I saw fit.
Chris Stapleton
Luke Bryan - 4
Eric Church - 2
Luke Combs - 5
Thomas Rhett - 1
Chris Stapleton - 3
Final Results
And that’s it! If we crunch the numbers on my ranking system we find that the winner of Entertainer of the Year with 27 points is *drum roll*... LUKE COMBS!
This makes a lot of sense if you really think about it. His popularity in the country music industry is increasing at a quick rate. And though the others are clearly fan favorites, I would find it hard to believe that based on all of the data that the academy is supposed to base their votes on that they would come to any result other than Luke Combs. However, I am not on the academy and I can only look at the data I have access to. The result may vary due to the alternative criteria that come into play. But I guess we will find out when it airs!
Thanks for hanging out with me this week and talking about some good ole country music. See ya next week!
- Sara
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