Steve Jobs to be given posthumous Grammy

ArtsBeat reports: Steve Jobs was not a musician, and opinions are mixed about whether the invention of iTunes will be good for the recording industry in the long run, but his mark on how music is distributed appears indelible, and so the National Academy of Recording Arts has decided to give Mr. Jobs a Grammy award in February.

Mr. Jobs, who died Oct. 5, will be given a Trustees Award, which honors “outstanding contributions to the industry in a nonperforming capacity.” The academy’s national board of trustees decided to honor Mr. Jobs because he “helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books,” the announcement said.

“A creative visionary, Jobs’ innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased,” the announcement said. (The academy already gave Apple Computer Inc. a Technical Grammy Award in 2002 for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field.)

Mr. Jobs is the only industrialist receiving an award this year. The other two recipients of the Trustees Award are David Bartholomew, a bandleader, composer and arranger who wrote more than 40 hits with Fats Domino in the 1950s, including “Ain’t That a Shame,” and Rudy Van Gelder, the recording engineer for thousands of jazz sessions with artists like John Coltrane, Miles David and Thelonius Monk.

The academy also announced the musicians who will receive its 2012 Lifetime Achievement Awards at the ceremony in Los Angeles on February 12: the Allman Brothers, Glen Campbell, George Jones, Diana Ross, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Memphis Horns and Gil-Scott Heron.