I hope to decide very soon who was the best pop singer/vocalist for the first half of 2012. That was the year I started writing about Pop songs including my lists of 10 Best Pop Songs of the first half and 25 Best Pop Songs for the year of 2012. I'm doing a first-half list and a full-year list again this year.
Last year, I mentioned the three leaders I chose in the category of Best Pop Vocalist for the First Half of 2012. They were Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and Ne-Yo. I'm also calling that category Best Pop Singer, but this isn't a Live Performance competition. While I care about hearing how they sound in Live videos, this is only about how their singing voices sound in the recordings. It doesn't have to be a studio recording because someone can record it any method and put it on YouTube.com or anywhere that it's available to listeners. I'm not much into rules and I really don't have rules. It's my decision though, regarding who gets in and why or why not.
Today, I'm adding Ai Shinozaki to the list. Of course, her name also appears as Shinozaki Ai. I don't think that I saw her video last year, so the song which I listened to many times in the recent months is called "Play for Free" may be in last year's second half list of best pop songs, which I haven't done yet, or I could make an exception and put it on a list for this year. Some of those videos uploaded to YouTube in the first half of 2012 were deleted or no longer available. That could have been why I didn't find it on time for last year. Those videos were listed by English language. However, thanks to my recent searches in Japanese, I was able to find the video.
I think she is a great singer and as far as I can tell this video first appeared in June 2012, therefore she qualifies for the first half of 2012 Best Pop Singer/Vocalist. I found a good upload of the video/song either today or yesterday on the Chinese video website Youku. That's at www.youku.com and I wanted to put that on here or my music reviews blog site, but I couldn't figure out how to do that since I didn't see a way to share on Blogger.com blogs like there is on YouTube. I will try to do that from YouTube even though the upload date is different.
Last year, I mentioned the three leaders I chose in the category of Best Pop Vocalist for the First Half of 2012. They were Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and Ne-Yo. I'm also calling that category Best Pop Singer, but this isn't a Live Performance competition. While I care about hearing how they sound in Live videos, this is only about how their singing voices sound in the recordings. It doesn't have to be a studio recording because someone can record it any method and put it on YouTube.com or anywhere that it's available to listeners. I'm not much into rules and I really don't have rules. It's my decision though, regarding who gets in and why or why not.
Today, I'm adding Ai Shinozaki to the list. Of course, her name also appears as Shinozaki Ai. I don't think that I saw her video last year, so the song which I listened to many times in the recent months is called "Play for Free" may be in last year's second half list of best pop songs, which I haven't done yet, or I could make an exception and put it on a list for this year. Some of those videos uploaded to YouTube in the first half of 2012 were deleted or no longer available. That could have been why I didn't find it on time for last year. Those videos were listed by English language. However, thanks to my recent searches in Japanese, I was able to find the video.
I think she is a great singer and as far as I can tell this video first appeared in June 2012, therefore she qualifies for the first half of 2012 Best Pop Singer/Vocalist. I found a good upload of the video/song either today or yesterday on the Chinese video website Youku. That's at www.youku.com and I wanted to put that on here or my music reviews blog site, but I couldn't figure out how to do that since I didn't see a way to share on Blogger.com blogs like there is on YouTube. I will try to do that from YouTube even though the upload date is different.
