Lady GaGa -7th Female to win Billboards Best Artist of the Year

Lady Gaga - Monster [TFM.3], originally uploaded by netmen!.

Lady Gaga is Billboard Magazine's 2010 Artist of
the Year Award winner, the 7th time a woman
has won since Billboard began handing it out 29
years ago in 1981. The magazine made the
announcement on December 9th.


Her reaction via Twitter was to equate the
award with "artistic freedom" and "self-invention"
and the fashion-conscious singer thanked her
fans, her Little Monsters. "Monsters have 6
Grammy nominations and Billboard award 'Artist
of the Year,' " she wrote. "Thank you for fighting
for artistic freedom and self-invention."


Billboard Artist of the Year: Two Billboard
Charts
Billboard's press release said: "The year-end Top
Artists list ranks the best-performing acts of the
year derived from activity on two charts: the
Billboard 200 albums tally and the Billboard Hot
100 singles list. Gaga takes the artist of the year
honor thanks in part to the chart performance of
her first two albums, "The Fame" and "The Fame
Monster", which rank at Nos. 4 and 13,
respectively, on the year-end Top Billboard 200
Albums tally."


While the magazine has been around longer
than 1981 it did not name a best artist until then.
Last year Taylor Swift won and this marks the
third time women have won it in consecutive
years.

Madonna won in 1985 and Whitney
Houston the next year; Canadian singer Alanis
Morissette won in 1996 followed in '97 by LeAnn
Rimes. The other female winner was Mariah
Carey in 1991.
Houston and now Gaga, along with Chris Brown,
are the only three who won the award in the year
following their having been named Billboard's
Top New Artist. Other males besides Brown -
who's won it twice - who've been named the
Billboard magazine Artist of the Year include two
time winner Garth Brooks (1992, '93), two time
winner Usher (1998 and 2004) and hip-hop artist
Nelly (2002).


Lady Gaga Released Single Telephone and
Alejandro in 2010
Gaga released the singles Telephone and
Alejandro in 2010, won six MTV Video Music
Awards including Best Video of the Year for Bad
Romance, toured her Monster Ball tour all over
the world - she's currently playing the U.K. - and
she surpassed one billion YouTube views.
Was there a down side to 2010? Well her meat-
dress was a poor decision - using the flesh of
dead animals as fashion seemed to turn many
people off - and she lost out to Justin Bieber for
the American Music Award's top artist.

Bieber has
also either overtaken her, or is close to overtaking
her, on the top of the YouTube views list.
However in late November she told a crowd in
Poland that her upcoming new album, "Born This
Way", coming out possibly in the spring of 2011,
is ready. "The album's finished and it's f**king
really good," Gaga boasted to her Little (Polish)
Monsters. "I promise to give you the greatest
album of this decade, just for you."


Source: Suite101.com