BRIT nominations out – Harry Styles and Wet Leg get four each

completemusicupdate.com:

The nominations are out for this year’s BRIT Awards. Once again, the focus has fallen on how diverse the shortlists are – or not – in particular now that the UK’s big music awards bash doesn’t have gender specific categories like Best Female and Best Male.One of the concerns raised when the BRITs decided to get rid of the gender specific categories was that it could result in less gender diversity overall.

Actually, last year – the first year without Best Female, Best Male et al – that didn’t really happen.However, this year things do definitely skew male overall, and most notably all the contenders for the prime Artist Of The Year prize are men.Which is disappointing, obviously, given how easy it is to name the female artists who could and should have appeared in that list as well.

But then again, both Best New Artist and Best International Artist do have more female nominees than male.There is also enough gender balance across the majority of the categories that, on the night itself, there could be more female winners than male winners.

Especially if Wet Leg win most of the four awards they are up for, which – of course – they should. We shall see.Meanwhile, whatever happens gender wise, it seems likely that the final winner list will be somewhat Harry Styles dominated.