Feeling Groupie

 I have always found it fun to look at the Billboard 200 charts for the top albums of a week and seeing what albums have debuted on the charts.  I recently looked at the charts for the week of October 10 th , 2020 (which considers the week of September 25 th -October 1 st ) and found several albums with something I found interesting or unusual.  Since there were so many I was intrigued by, I want to discuss each of them with you.   Typically, I’m surprised when I see five albums debut in the top 10 in a single week.   In this particular week, there were 6 albums that debuted in the top 10 and several others on the top 200.   While I normally notice a couple albums that I find interesting listed in the charts, there are 11 albums that I found especially fascinating and would like to talk about.   This week has a combination of several oddities as well as signs of trends in music.   During this particular week, the Billboard 200 featured albums ...

Every year I predict the nominees for the four major categories at the Grammys:  Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist.  The 2021 Grammys will consider the music of 2020; specifically, it will consider music released between September 1 st , 2019 and August 31 st , 2020.  While there are certain technicalities and some messiness behind the scenes to determine if a release is eligible for each category, eligibility each Grammy category requires a release to be submitted.  While almost all the remaining awards have 5 nominees each year, the major awards each have 8 nominees.  In this post, I rank several potential nominees for each of the awards by how likely I think each is.  I will also discuss some of the most likely. Due to the length of my predictions and formatting issues, my predictions are posted in a Google Drive file.  In order to access my predictions, I have included a link to the file.  This file i...

Many individuals involved in music and their fans desperately needs your help.  Obviously, the pandemic has put millions of people into situations where they are struggling.  The entertainment industry is an industry that has been hit especially hard, as evident by the concerts, festival, sporting events, and other large scale events that are normally prevalent but have been absent this year.  While companies in this industry will be understandably among the last to resume work at full capability, smaller music venues will struggle the most from this and many will not be able to survive the pandemic. However, there is something we can do to help.  The Save Our Stages Act (S. 4258) and RESTART Act (S. 3814) are opportunities to help out these small businesses, many of which are vital to our communities and economies.  These businesses make it possible for many involved in the music industry to get their start and for most professional musicians to achieve their l...

Hello!   My name is Matt and welcome to the first post of Feeling Groupie!  This new blog is going to be about music.  It is my first blog and I am incredibly excited to write it! I have always been a massive fan of various aspects of music.  I enjoy listening to it, learning about music history, learning music trends, reviewing music, analyzing different music events, predicting festival lineups and award winners, writing music and tunes, and talking about music in general.   I started a podcast about music, Groupie and Harmony, in November of 2019.   I found that while I have enjoyed podcasting, there are certain limitations to this medium.   I found that certain topics don’t lend themselves well to podcasting and there are restrictions into how much detail I can go into with some topics.   After one series took several more episodes than I intended, I concluded that it would be beneficial to explore what I can do with a blog. I have a few i...