Apple on Tuesday officially announced its first-ever Apple Music Awards with artists Billie Eilish, Lizzo and Lil Nas X taking the top honors in 2019.
Apple honors achievements in music across five distinct categories, and here are the winners:
- Album of the Year: Billie Eilish’s debut album “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” had more than a billion streams on Apple Music in 2019.
- Song of the Year: The song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X was the most-streamed single of the year on Apple Music in 2019.
- Artist of the Year: Billie Eilish, pictured at the top of this post.
- Songwriter of the Year: Billie Eilish also received the award for Songwriter of the Year, which will go to both her and her brother Finneas.
- Breakthrough Artist of the Year: Rap and soul supernova Lizzo received a year’s-best eight Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year for “Cuz I Love You.”
For additional details, feel free to browse the winners on Apple Music.
Apple Music will celebrate the occasion by hosting a bespoke, live-streamed performance by Billie Eilish at the Steve Jobs Theater on December 4 at 6:30pm PST. “The show will be unlike anything ever seen from this unanimously crowned Artist of the Year,” Apple noted.
The winners for Album of the Year and Song of the Year are based on streaming data, while the winners for Global Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Breakthrough Artist of the Year have been hand-picked by Apple Music’s global editorial team.
Apple bills this as an award that is “uniquely Apple.” The company actually designed a series of hardware awards that feature its custom twelve-inch silicon wafer, as pictured above.
Here’s Apple’s description of the award:
Each award features Apple’s custom silicon wafer suspended between a polished sheet of glass and a machined and anodized aluminum body. The wafers start as a perfect 12-inch disc of silicon with nanometer level flatness. Copper layers are deposited and patterned by ultraviolet lithography to create connections between billions of transistors.
The result of this multi-month process, before it is sliced into hundreds of individual chips, is stunning and distinctive. In a symbolic gesture, the same chips which power the devices that put the world’s music at your fingertips sit at the very heart of the Apple Music Awards.
The iPhone maker also posted the best-of media and app charts on iTunes and App Stores.